Gangs of Galicia on Netflix is what Galicia built when Spain looked the other way

There is a real lawyer, born in the Galician fishing town of Cambados, who ran a municipal center for victims of gender violence, then began representing the stepson of one of the region’s most notorious drug patriarchs, then crossed her professional lines incrementally until she had become a fugitive sought across Europe by Interpol, finally captured in a playground in Sitges, living under a false identity with a daughter no one knew existed. The real story of Tania Varela does not contain revenge, or a murdered father, or a romantic infiltration. It contains something more disturbing: a series of small professional decisions, each individually defensible, that collectively dismantled a life and a legal career over the space of a few years in a community where the distance between the legitimate economy and the criminal one had never been clearly maintained by anyone, including the institutions that were supposed to maintain it.

Clara Lago’s Ana González — the fictional version of that real biographical arc — arrives in Season 2 of Gangs of Galicia (Clanes) three years deeper into the world she came to expose. The Madrid lawyer who infiltrated the Padín clan to investigate her father’s murder is no longer an infiltrator. She is an operator, positioned by the rival clan against the family she loves, knowing that what she is about to do will most likely end both the Padíns and her relationship with Daniel. The series has removed the last instrument through which it was providing the audience with moral distance from its criminal world: the outsider who could see it clearly because she had not yet been entirely formed by it. Season 2’s Ana can no longer serve that function. She is Cambados now, in the specific sense that matters — she understands the community’s economy from the inside, she has absorbed its codes, and she operates within its logic even when that logic is destroying everything she arrived with.

Interview with Rico Leon (“Rico to the Rescue”) – Exclusive on Martin Cid Magazine

This is the social reality that the Galician narco tradition has always been most honest about, and that the best work in that tradition — Fariña (Cocaine Coast), the documentary journalism of Nacho Carretero, the academic study of what researchers have begun calling Galician noir — has documented with precision that the drama sometimes softens. Galicia did not acquire its position as Europe’s primary cocaine gateway through criminal invasion. It acquired it through the self-organized economic adaptation of communities that the Spanish state had left to manage their own survival. Under Franco, the region was underdeveloped and institutionally abandoned. The coastal communities built their own logistics networks for the basic necessities Madrid did not supply — medicines, fuel, food — and in doing so created the maritime infrastructure, the community silence, and the specific culture of profitable self-reliance that the transition from tobacco to cocaine required almost no modification to use. The fishermen who became traffickers were not making a moral choice. They were making the same rational economic choice their communities had been making for generations, with different cargo.

By the time the Medellín cartel found them in the mid-1980s — discovering in Galician fishing villages the exact maritime infrastructure and community discretion their European distribution required — eighty percent of the cocaine entering Europe was coming through the Galician rías. Forty years later, Spain surpassed Belgium and the Netherlands in cocaine seizures in 2023, with 142 tons intercepted — evidence not of a criminal problem that Operation Nécora and its successors resolved but of a criminal economy that simply adapted. Contemporary Galician networks have professionalized their role: rather than owning or distributing drugs, they now offer maritime transport services — a logistics sector within the European cocaine supply chain, which makes them simultaneously less visible and more structurally embedded. The narcos are not more discreet because they reformed. They are more discreet because they learned, from the 1990 raids conducted by judge Baltasar Garzón, that the state had finally decided to look. Invisibility was the adaptation.

This is the world that Season 2 extends into Dublin, following the actual logistics chain that connects Galicia’s maritime infrastructure to the British and Irish markets where the Galician networks have operated for decades. The production decision to shoot partly in Ireland is not a concession to international audiences. It is an acknowledgment that the criminal world Clanes depicts is not a regional period piece but a present-tense, multinational supply network with maritime operations that cross the Atlantic. The Padín clan’s world is not Cambados. Cambados is its administrative center, its social base, its community identity. The operation extends wherever the sea reaches.

The arrival of Luis Zahera as Paco “El Curilla” is the season’s most culturally loaded decision, and not only because Zahera won the Goya Award for his work in The Beasts. His performances understand Galician rural masculinity — its territorial codes, its contempt for outside intervention, its violence maintained as a community norm rather than an exception — with the specific authority of someone who does not need to perform it. But El Curilla is not a Galician patriarch. He is a different species of operator: one who has identified the clan loyalty system as a structural vulnerability and proposes to exploit it by offering the Padíns’ rivals a second playing card. His arrival in the world of Clanes is a social diagnosis as much as a dramatic development — the presence of a new generation of criminal operator who has no relationship to the village roots that gave the original clans their specific moral architecture and their genuine social function. He is pure economic logic inside a world that has always justified itself through the language of family and community.

The question of what Clanes does differently from Fariña — the 2018 series that established “Galician noir” as a recognized dramatic subgenre and remains the most formally rigorous examination of this criminal world — is the question that the series must answer through the quality of its second season rather than through the romantic architecture of its first. Fariña was a social chronicle: it documented how tobacco smuggling networks transitioned into cocaine logistics, how the political and economic relationships that sustained the clans were embedded in the legitimate institutions of the region, how the community’s response to the “lost generation” of Galician youth destroyed by heroin eventually forced the state to act. Its precision was sociological rather than psychological. Where Clanes has consistently operated is in the domestic and relational interior of the clan world — the inherited obligations, the impossible romantic positions, the specific weight of being born into a name that constitutes both a family and a criminal enterprise. That is a different instrument for the same subject, and it is not necessarily inferior. But it carries a specific risk: that the romantic scaffolding will resolve the social complexity into personal drama, leaving the community’s structural conditions untouched.

The real police officers who worked the GRECO Galicia operations and were consulted during the production’s development identified the specific distortion with precision: the series grants its fictional Daniel an aura of being a fundamentally good person, which real-world narco investigators treat as the show’s most significant concession to its audience’s comfort. But that distortion is also, arguably, the series’ social argument — it is what the community believed and continues to believe about the families that sustained it economically for forty years. The Galician narco patriarch was not experienced as a criminal by the community he lived inside. He was experienced as a benefactor, a neighbor, a man who financed the local football team and lent money to people who needed it. The series reproducing that community experience — the inside view rather than the institutional view — is what distinguishes it from a police procedural and aligns it with the most honest tradition of crime fiction: not the story the law tells about the criminal, but the story the community tells about itself.

Gangs of Galicia Netflix — CLANES. Clara Lago as Ana in episode 05 of CLANES. Cr. Jaime Olmedo/Netflix © 2025

Season 2 premieres globally on Netflix on April 3, 2026. The six episodes are written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría, directed by Marc Vigil and Javier Rodríguez, and produced by Vaca Films — the Galician production company that has made this specific social world its sustained cinematic project. Clara Lago and Tamar Novas return as Ana and Daniel, with Luis Zahera joining as the new power whose arrival reorganizes the clan dynamics around him. Shooting took place in Cambados and the surrounding Salnés comarca, with additional production in Dublin for the scenes that extend the trafficking network’s geography into the British and Irish markets it actually serves.

The question that Season 2 cannot answer — that no arrest, no reconciliation, and no departure from Cambados can resolve — is whether a person whose moral framework has been entirely reorganized by a criminal world can return to the values they brought with them, and whether the world they came from would recognize what they brought back if they did. The real Tania Varela was captured in a playground in Sitges with a daughter nobody knew existed, living under a false identity, having fled a conviction for money laundering she accumulated through a series of professional crossings that began with a client consultation. She did not intend to become what she became. The community she entered did not force her into it. It simply continued to be what it had always been — a place where the line between legal and illegal had never been clearly maintained by anyone with the authority to maintain it — and she adapted to that environment the way everyone else who lives there has been adapting to it for forty years. The Galician coast does not transform people. It reveals what they become when the institutional structures they depended on for their moral positioning are absent. That is the question that Cambados has been asking of everyone who arrives from elsewhere to investigate it, and that it will continue asking long after the investigation ends.