Daniel Sempere The Cemetery of Forgotten Books
Chapter 1
Before dawn, Daniel's father takes him to a secret labyrinthine library where each visitor adopts one book to protect for life. Daniel chooses a novel by Julián Carax, and that choice sets the whole story in motion. The place is a fiction, but Zafón roots it in a real, shadowy street a few steps off the Rambla.
Chapter 1, opening
inspired by The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is invented. The novel leads the boy to it through the tangled lanes off the lower Rambla, and readers and Zafón's own companion pieces place its doorway on Carrer de l'Arc del Teatre in the Raval; sited on that street as a representative point.
Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗
Daniel Sempere Sempere & Sons, Carrer de Santa Anna
Chapter 1
The bookshop where Daniel lives and works with his widowed father, the still centre the story keeps returning to. Zafón sets it on Carrer de Santa Anna, a narrow shopping street near the top of the Rambla; the shop is invented but the address is one any reader can walk to.
Chapter 1
explicit Carrer de Santa Anna is named in the novel and is a real street just off Plaça de Catalunya; the Sempere family bookshop itself is fictional, so this marks a representative point on the street.
Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗