General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Gangs of Galicia

Gangs of Galicia (Spanish title Clanes) is a Spanish crime drama television series on Netflix about drug trafficking in Galicia, created and written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and produced by Vaca Films. It stars Clara Lago as Ana, a Madrid lawyer who moves to the Galician town of Cambados after her father's murder and infiltrates the Padín drug clan led by Daniel (Tamar Novas), the son of an imprisoned trafficker.¹ The first season premiered on June 21, 2024, with seven episodes of about 50 minutes each.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / network	Clanes on Netflix; produced by Vaca Films¹
Creator	Jorge Guerricaechevarría (creator and screenwriter); season 1 directed by Roger Gual¹
Season 1	7 episodes of about 50 minutes, premiered June 21, 2024²
Setting	Cambados, Galicia, and Madrid; inspired by real events from Galician drug trafficking in the 1990s and 2000s²
Season 1 audience	Five weeks in Netflix's global top 10, 74.2 million viewing hours, 13.9 million completed views³
Season 2	6 episodes, released April 3, 2026⁴
Season 3	Announced June 2026 as the third and final season, directed by Ángeles Huerta and Javier Rodríguez⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Ana (Clara Lago) is an experienced Madrid lawyer whose father, Jorge, works on a tourist sailboat in Fuerteventura. After he is shot dead on his boat, Ana discovers he had a secret bank account and left money to two strangers, Berta (María Pujalte) and Laura (Melania Cruz), from Cambados. Her father, it emerges, was a drug trafficker who had entered a witness protection program after giving evidence against the Padín family, the area's largest drug-dealing organization.⁶^•⁷

Ana moves to Cambados to investigate his past and comes into contact with Daniel Padín (Tamar Novas), the visible head of the clan while his father (Miguel de Lira) remains in prison. Daniel wants Ana to represent him in court, and what begins as her quest for answers becomes an intense, ambiguous relationship between duty, love, and organized crime.¹^•² A National Police task force led by Detective Naranjo (Francesc Garrido) works to bring down the organization throughout.⁸

The second season, released April 3, 2026, picks up after a nearly two-year gap. In the announced third and final season, Ana lives under witness protection far from Cambados with her mother and daughter Sara, Daniel has left the family business but remains obsessed with finding them, and an Albanian clan moves to take over the Padíns' smuggling operation.⁴^•⁵

Real events behind the story

Netflix describes the series as inspired by real events rather than based on a book.⁶ The Rías Baixas Film Commission notes that its inspiration comes from Galician drug trafficking in the 1990s and 2000s, and specifically from Operación Nécora of 1990, the first major police investigation against drug networks in Galicia.² Spanish press coverage also points to the Padín case itself as material for the thriller.⁹

The fictional premise reflects how the real clans operated. Galicia's smuggling groups, known as "clans", moved from tobacco and other goods into drugs during the 1980s, when they entered a lasting relationship with Colombian cocaine cartels seeking access to the European market.¹⁰ The series' device of an imprisoned patriarch whose son runs the business mirrors the pattern in which the old guard went to jail and the next generation kept the trade going.¹¹

Production and filming

Vaca Films, founded by Emma Lustres and Borja Pena in 2003, produced the series; its other television work includes The Mess You Leave Behind and Sky High: The Series for Netflix.¹ Shooting for the first season ran from 2023 into 2024.² Filming took place in Madrid, A Coruña, Cádiz, Cambados, and Málaga in Spain, as well as Dakar (Senegal), Porto (Portugal), and Gibraltar.⁶ Guerricaechevarría has said the show's portrayal of modern trafficking required an international police footprint, because cartels are now globalized.¹¹

The series sits within a broader wave of Galician-set crime fiction. Critics have grouped it with Fariña, Vivir sin permiso, and other "Galician noir" productions that draw on the region's history as a landing place for smugglers and its drug-trafficking past.¹² A scholarly commentary notes that although the series uses regional markers such as a Tanxugueiras song in its trailer and the international title Gangs of Galicia, the Galician language itself appears only occasionally on screen, with a fully Galician-language television news item and a musical setting of Rosalía de Castro's poem Canta miña sombra reserved for the final episode of season 1.¹³

Reception

Season 1 was a commercial success for Netflix, spending five weeks in the platform's global top 10 with 74.2 million viewing hours and 13.9 million completed views; season 2 reached the Non-English TV top 10 for one week with 9.9 million hours watched and 2.1 million views.³ Critical response was mixed: Rotten Tomatoes records a 50% Tomatometer from 6 reviews and a 65% audience score.¹⁴ The Irish News called it a "perfectly competent gangland drama" while praising Clara Lago's performance as Ana.⁷ In June 2026 Netflix renewed the series for a third and final season, with Luis Zahera joining the returning cast.⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026