In 2021, the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted for 85 uninterrupted days on La Palma, causing damage never before seen on the island, and which in many cases has not yet been overcome. Enough time has passed, however, for the disaster to become fiction. (relatively, as we will see below). Has it been through an ambitious production by Mediaset, Movistar, Atresmedia or Netflix Spain? Not exactly: the Norwegians have taken charge.
The title of this four-episode miniseries that you can watch on Netflix is ’The Palm‘ and has been in the Top of the most watched in the non-English speaking series category for more than a week. And not only in Spain, where it would be perfectly logical, but on a global level: worldwide it has 13,100,000 views, tripling the number 2 in the top this week, the Korean ‘When the Phone Rings’. La Palma has entered the Top 10 of 90 countries and has reached number 1 in 23 of them.
This success has arrived unexpectedly on the platform, especially considering that much more ambitious series such as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ or ‘1992’ have also been released recently. In fact, its origin is very curious: the series was devised before the Cumbre Vieja eruption. When the real event took place, filming was stopped. Later it was resumed, but The series takes different paths from what really happened.
The series tells the completely fictional story of a Norwegian family who travels to La Palma for Christmas. The eruption of a volcano and the threat of a tsunami turns survival into an odyssey. Luckily, in the real events there were no fatalities (although there were countless material damages), but the series, once again, deviates from the facts, and we will see how the lava and the fury of nature claim numerous lives.
Header | Netflix
In WorldOfSoftware | The La Palma volcano has been preparing for four years: this is how Cumbre Vieja is teaching us to predict volcanic eruptions