10 Apr Tenerife and… Action! A Film-Worthy Destination With the Best Tax Incentives
“Aside from the actors, it’s the most important thing. Choosing the right location is everything, sometimes for sentimental reasons as well.” – David Trueba – Spanish film and television screenwriter, director, newspaper columnist, and novelist.
Finding the sort of atmosphere the film will exude, the right location or setting for the film, and casting the actors who will play the various characters, are two complicated tasks that must be tackled in the earliest stages of a project: preproduction.
When looking for suitable locations, spaces, and backdrops for the script, it is imperative that the key decision-makers working on the project be present, including the heads of the various departments that might be affected by the choice of location.
If the location is impracticable, no matter how idyllic it may otherwise be, it can lead to unnecessary production expenses and lost time, which can be disastrous for the budget.
With this in mind, there is a destination where film crews can shoot 900 different landscapes within a 2,000-km² area any time of year that offers innumerable advantages for all sorts of productions.
Can you guess which destination we’re talking about?
Tenerife, Nature’s Studio: Beaches and Mountains Less Than One Hour From Each Other
Over 1,000 productions have been shot in Tenerife since the year 2000.
These include such works as: “Clash of the Titans,” “Wrath of the Titans,” “Fast & Furious,” “Jason Bourne,” and “Wonder Woman 1984.” Furthermore, internationally renown production companies such as Warner Bros Pictures and Universal Pictures have chosen Tenerife as the setting for some of their famous films.
Viewers may think shooting a film on an island is exotic; but, for producers, it is more than a luxury to realize that, in a single location, they’ll find a wide range of diverse landscapes in which to bring to life a script that requires multiple natural settings and also be able to fit in characters, costumes, and special effects without having to travel from place to place.
This unique territory features: urban landscapes, colonial towns, rural villages, industrial areas, beaches, forests, deserts, ocean, mountains, volcanoes… all in one place.
Tenerife offers the audiovisual industry a natural studio in which 48% of the natural landscape is part of a protected area, where it’s possible to shoot 365 days a year, with an average temperature of 23ºC (73ºF), excellent light quality, and 3,000 daylight hours a year. What more could you possibly ask for?
As if all that weren’t enough, the Canary Islands offer the best tax scheme in all of Europe.
The Best Tax Incentives in Europe
Because of their geographical distance from mainland Spain and Europe, the Canary Islands enjoy their own special tax regime.
The so-called Canary Islands Special Economic and Tax Scheme (REF) was approved with the aim of promoting economic and social development in the archipelago. For audiovisual productions, this results in a series of attractive tax benefits:
- A 45-40% deduction for Spanish productions. That’s 20 points more than in the rest of the country.
- A 40% deduction for foreign productions, compared to 20% in the rest of Spain.
- The Canary Islands constitute the Canary Island Special Zone (ZEC). This is a low-tax area authorized by the European Union where companies can pay a 4% Corporate Tax Rate (compared to a general rate of 20-30%).
- The Reserve for Investments in the Canary Islands (RIC) offers companies that invest in the audiovisual sector to pay up to 90% less tax.
These conditions are a tremendous advantage as far as production costs, helping to improve the viability of any project.
Bear in mind the sort of demands and difficulties audiovisual productions are faced with, and it’s no wonder that a place like Tenerife that offers all these advantages in a striking natural setting is considered a point of reference for international film shoots.
INtech Tenerife: Infrastructure and Top-Level Professional Experts
Relocating has never been easy, but how do you over come the sense of isolation in an island like Tenerife?
Studios and production companies that choose Tenerife as a location can rely on the support of specialized companies and experts from the island at every stage of production.
In fact, the island has already participated in numerous national and international productions (including those mentioned earlier) and offers all the necessary know-how.
Plus, Tenerife is also home to D-Alix, the Neutral Internet Access Point (NAP) for Western Africa and the Canary Islands.
D-Alix is a data center that leverages the island’s geographic location as a tri-continental bridge between the Americas, Europe, and Africa to connect the continents through various undersea cables. Thanks to this, Tenerife’s international connectivity has nothing to envy other territories.
The access point also hosts the Teide Supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Spain and one of the few available for use in rendering animations, CGI film special effects, and other audiovisual post-production processes.
Thanks to INtech Tenerife’s infrastructures and workspaces, the audiovisual industry can enjoy all the advantages the island has to offer. One of INtech’s objectives is to promote the development of audiovisual productions in Tenerife and make sure they can operate on a global scale.