Marbella is not only one of the most popular holiday destinations in Spain and a meeting place for the international jet set. It is also the enclave where more than one hundred criminal organizations of multiple nationalities operate. A lesser-known reality that the Marbella series approaches starting this Thursday.
Dani de la Torre and Alberto Marini (La Unidad and La Unidad Kabul) are the creative people responsible for this fiction that delves into the network of criminal gangs that operate on the Costa del Sol through César, an ambitious and seductive lawyer who embodies Hugo Silva.
Following the publication in El País of a report by Nacho Carretero and Arturo Lezcano about Marbella as the global headquarters of organized crime, De la Torre and Marini saw the perfect story for their new fiction project. “We went to Marbella to document ourselves and we understood that there was nothing sensational in that article because we saw with our eyes how the mafias installed there move freely without hiding,” explains Marini.
“Marbella is a particular ecosystem with its rules and balance,” says the protagonist just as the first episode begins. And that is reflected in the series. “It is a very strange ecosystem. In Puerto Banús we saw yachts, designer clothes, 20-30 year old kids with high-end cars worth 300,000 euros…,” De la Torre recalls. “But beyond the extreme luxury, the reality is that in a city as small as Marbella, 120 criminal organizations coexist and there is also something there that does not happen anywhere else in the world and that is that it lives in peace,” adds Marini.
There are settling of accounts, but they are the exception. “There is a system of coexistence based on peacemakers, criminals with a very important resume and prestige who receive money to keep peace among themselves,” he adds.
The protagonist that forms the backbone of the story is not a police officer or a drug trafficking boss as is usually the case, but a lawyer, César. Because? “When we visited Marbella we met a lawyer who defends drug traffickers and it seemed like a perfect common thread because the lawyer reaches the police, the judges, the drug traffickers…”, answers De la Torre.
Through this protagonist, the series also shows the hedonistic and exuberant Marbella, where everyone wants to show off the money they have. “This lawyer is the link between all the Marbellas that we wanted to tell. And then there is always the issue of morality and its limits,” Marini advances. “People move in Marbella for money, ambition, showing off, being able to be… And our protagonist was not going to be an exception.”
The lawyer played by Hugo Silva sometimes breaks the fourth wall to address the viewer directly. “Caesar is the narrator of the story and a perfect trickster. He does it with the police, with his family, with the drug traffickers, with his colleagues at his law firm and we needed him to do it one piece, for him to also try to deceive the public who are watching him,” reveals De la Torre.
Marini insists in closing that Marbella is a fictional series inspired by “very real events” and everything that seems very forced is not. “Details have been changed, but the most incredible thing is real and it cannot be denied that Marbella is now the capital of organized crime. “It would be like denying that there was no mafia in Sicily in the eighties or that there are no drug cartels in Colombia.”
