Ciudad de la Luz opened in 2005 as one of the largest and most modern film complexes in Europe, a purpose-built town of soundstages, workshops, and backlots spread across the flat coastal land south of Alicante. Its centerpiece was a set of enormous sound stages and, crucially, a giant outdoor water tank, the kind of facility that lets a production drown a street or stage a shipwreck without ever leaving dry Spain. The pitch was simple and seductive: world-class stages, a deep well of local crew and technicians, and a climate that hands directors reliable sunlight almost year-round. Between opening and its abrupt end, roughly sixty films were made within its walls.

The talent that passed through was real and the work often ambitious. Francis Ford Coppola shot his family drama Tetro here. The Alicante stages hosted Manolete, the story of Spain's legendary bullfighter, with Adrien Brody and Penélope Cruz, and the sprawling comedy Asterix at the Olympic Games, with Gérard Depardieu. Most memorably, the studio's great water tank became the sea itself for The Impossible, Juan Antonio Bayona's harrowing film about a family caught in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The wall of water that tears a family apart on screen was engineered here, on the calm Alicante shore, proof that the City of Light could conjure catastrophe as convincingly as any studio in the world.

Ambition on this scale needs money, and the money came from the public purse. That proved to be the fatal flaw. In May 2012, the European Commission ruled that the subsidies the studio had received from the regional government amounted to illegal state aid under European competition law, and it ordered Ciudad de la Luz to repay 265 million euros. A studio built to compete could not survive being told its competitive edge was against the rules. In October 2012 the complex was shut down and prepared for sale. Projects in the pipeline simply evaporated, among them a historical epic called King Conqueror, planned with Tim Roth in the cast, which economic troubles killed before a frame was shot.

A place this large does not vanish just because its purpose does. Rather than sell, the government kept the facilities and pressed them into other service through the lean years, sheltering digital startups and, during the pandemic, operating as a mass COVID vaccination center, its film stages filled with people in line instead of crews on set. The reprieve came in March 2022, when the European Union at last lifted its restrictions and cleared the studio to host film shoots again from that July. After a decade dark, the City of Light switched back on, courting productions once more and floating plans to house operations as significant as a hub for the broadcaster Euronews.