“La casa de papel”: 5 curiosities you need to know before the end

A disappointing first broadcast

Before being broadcast by the Netflix platform, “La casa de papel” premiered on the Spanish channel Antena 3, which produced the series with Vancouver Media. On its debut, on May 2, 2017, the first episode was relatively successful, with more than 4 million viewers, but from then on the series went flat. The last episode broadcast on Antena 3, at the end of the second season, reached 1.4 million viewers. The series seemed to have come to an end when it was rescued by Netflix.

Crisis and subversion

The 2008 crisis, whose harsh impact on Spain lasted for years, with its multi-million dollar bailout of the banks, prepared viewers to sympathize with a gang of robbers and elevate them as rebels. His red jumpsuit and Salvador Dalí mask became commonplace in the demonstrations and the series’ main song, “Bella Ciao”, that of the Italian partisans of World War II, recovered its old luster as an antifascist anthem and entered for the first time on the charts.

Like life itself

“When life imitates art. It seems fiction, but they are images of Criciúma during this morning,” said a user on Twitter along with two photos, one of a scene from “The paper house” and another of a shocking robbery in that city ​​of Brazil in October 2020. As in the series, a group of hooded men robbed a bank using explosives and in their flight they set fire to vehicles and scattered banknotes in the air, which residents came to collect, obstructing the work of the police.

Tokyo, Rio, Berlin …

“Every time I see a Tokyo shirt I buy it, but the genuine one, the authentic one that he wore on the day of his christening is the one in the second image,” the creator of the series, Álex Pina, once explained on Instagram.

Pina alludes to the “christening” of the main character, played by Úrsula Corberó, who came up with the name of the Japanese capital after the shirt she was wearing that day. Other cities would give names to other robbers: Lisbon, Nairobi, Berlin, Rio, Denver, Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, Bogotá, Palermo, Marseille and Manila.

… and Madrid, the big stage

It is common in Madrid to see admirers of “La casa de papel” take photos in front of the National Currency and Stamp Factory, in the Goya neighborhood, the place robbed in the series, although the exteriors of the building seen in it are as from another official building, the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), near Paseo de la Castellana.

The supposed roof of the Royal Mint was actually that of the Higher Technical School of Aeronautical Engineers, in the university area to the west of the capital; The warehouse from where the coup El Professor directs in the first season is in the San Blas neighborhood, and the Plaza de Callao, on Gran Vía, was where bills fell from the sky in a promotional clip for the series.