"Guell Park. After a fashion. Barcelona, if you like."

 As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact.Then it became metal again, green-​painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder.

A few drops of rain blew into her face.

Smell of rain and wet earth.

A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek's illusion.

Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well, fighting vertigo. She knew this place. She was in the Guell Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise behind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of crazy-​quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of rough stone. Its fountain-​grin watered a bed of tired flowers.

William Gibson, Count Zero

There's a long list of places that I know only as fictional settings, and Barcelona's Parc Güell is one of them, thanks to its appearance in Gibson’s Count Zero. Other than that, I didn’t really have any sort of impression as to the reality that lay behind its use as a virtual setting in the novel, but I was curious enough to add it to my list of places to go when the cruise ship docked in Spain.

I was astonished to discover that behind the ceramic dragon that has become the icon for the park, there's a fantastic array of rough-hewn promenades and viaducts threading the grounds together like the underpinnings of an alien metropolis.

Has no one ever thought of using the Parc Güell as the backdrop for a science fiction or fantasy film? It's easy to imagine some race of giant alien arthropods à la The Dark Crystal making their solemn way through the irregular semi-organic buttresses and past the peculiar colonnades spawned by Gaudi’s imagination, or faery folk duelling in front of the gingerbread curves and swells of his buildings.

A bit of research online reveals that some movies have been shot at the park, but with the best will in the world, Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn't really what I have in mind.

- Sid