A film studio painted an entire Andalusian village blue in 2011, on the written condition that it would be returned to white once the campaign ended. Fifteen years later the village is still blue and the studio’s characters are gone. Júzcar kept the colour and lost the licence, which is a rarer outcome than it sounds and the reason the place is worth the mountain road.
Are there still Smurfs in Júzcar? No. Sony Pictures painted the village in 2011 for the premiere of The Smurfs 3D, using more than 4,000 litres of paint that reached the church of Santa Catalina, on condition it went back to white. The residents voted to keep the blue, the figures were removed, and Júzcar now calls itself La Aldea Azul.
Sony Pictures painted the village in 2011 to launch The Smurfs 3D, church of Santa Catalina included, using more than 4,000 litres of paint. There is no train to Júzcar and none to the Serranía de Ronda either, so the mountain road is the only way in.
What is there now
Anyone arriving expecting Smurfs will find none. That is the single most useful thing to know before setting out, because the mountain road into the Genal valley is long enough that arriving disappointed is an expensive mistake.
Are there still Smurfs in Júzcar? No. The figures were removed and the village stopped using the name after no agreement was reached with the rights holders. It now promotes itself as La Aldea Azul, the Blue Village. The blue facades remain, and they are the reason to go.
The village removed the character figures, dropped the branding and rebuilt its tourism identity around the colour alone. The church of Santa Catalina, painted along with the houses in the original job, is still blue, and it remains the single most photographed thing in the village. The distinction matters more than it looks: a colour belongs to nobody, whereas characters belong to somebody. What was painted in 2011 under someone else’s permission became, after a local vote that December, something no contract could take back.
Getting there, and what it costs in time
There is no train to Júzcar, and none reaches Ronda either, the reference town for the whole range, as covered in Ronda from Malaga.
The commuter network runs along the western coast and up the Guadalhorce valley and no further, its 17 stations on one line and nine on the other, which is set out in Malaga’s C1 and C2. Access is by mountain road, on timings that rarely match a map, and the Genal valley strings several villages along the same route — Genalguacil, Alpandeire, Benadalid — so a second stop costs more of the day than expected.
Whether hiring a car pays for an outing like this is weighed in hiring a car in Malaga, the rest of the province with real timings is in day trips from Malaga, and the walking routes through the same range are in hiking near Malaga.
One practical consequence of all that: Júzcar does not combine with the coast in the way Frigiliana does, which is a short hop from Nerja. Here the valley is the day, not an add-on to one, and that comparison is drawn out in Frigiliana and Nerja in one day.
The vote that made it permanent
In spring 2011, Sony Pictures was looking for a setting to launch The Smurfs 3D worldwide and chose this village in the Genal valley, in the Serranía de Ronda, until then one more whitewashed settlement in the range.
More than 4,000 litres of blue went onto the facades, reaching as far as the church of Santa Catalina. Sony Pictures set both the scale of the job and its end date. The contract carried an expiry date and a condition: return the village to white when the campaign was over.
In December 2011, with the studio contract running out, the mayor of the time, David Fernández, put the question to the village.
| Option | Votes |
|---|---|
| Stay blue | 149 votes |
| Against | 36 votes |
| Spoiled | 4 votes |
| Blank | 6 votes |
Discounting the spoiled ballots, that is 78% in favour. The facades have not been whitewashed since, which probably makes Júzcar the only municipality in the province whose colour was settled at a ballot box, and it is why the blue survived the contract that produced it.
A blue village in white village country
The geography carries its own irony. Júzcar sits in the Genal valley inside the Serranía de Ronda, surrounded by whitewashed settlements, and it is the only one of them that broke ranks on colour.
It is not part of the official Pueblos Blancos route either, whose 19 places all lie in Cádiz province, as explained in the white villages. That route is what most visitors mean when they book a white villages day, and it starts beyond Ronda rather than here. The same valley does hold Genalguacil, which belongs to The Most Beautiful Villages of Spain and is nicknamed the museum village for its more than 120 contemporary artworks spread through the streets.
One valley, then, with a village that is an open-air museum and another that was painted for a film and stayed that way. Neither belongs to the route that gives the region its name, a useful reminder that the label and the map are two different things.
Why the characters went and the colour stayed
Press reports set out what followed, and the Ayuntamiento de Júzcar has never published its own account of the negotiation. The heirs of Pierre Culliford, the illustrator known as Peyo who created the characters, sought a share of the revenue the municipality was earning through them, and the company managing the rights approached the council to formalise the arrangement.
No agreement was reached. The figures came down, the name was dropped, and the village continued under its own colour.
Who owns a colour
Two parties had a claim on what happened at Júzcar and neither ended up owning the outcome. Sony Pictures paid for the paint in 2011; the heirs of Pierre Culliford held the characters. A promotional campaign meant to last one summer became the permanent identity of a municipality of the Serranía de Ronda, and the rights holders walked away with none of it, because the element that stuck was the one nobody could license.
That is why La Aldea Azul works as a name and pueblo pitufo no longer does. One describes a fact about the walls; the other describes somebody else’s property. Paint is not a trademark, and a village that voted on its own appearance in December 2011 is not easy to unpaint.
Worth stating plainly: these details of the dispute come from press reporting rather than from a municipal source, so they appear here attributed. What is beyond doubt is the visible outcome, that the village is blue and the characters are not there. Nothing published by the council contradicts that, and nothing published by it confirms the terms either.
The valley Júzcar sits in has a season of its own, when the chestnut turns copper, covered in the Genal valley in autumn.
Frequently asked questions about Júzcar
Are there still Smurfs in Júzcar?
No. The village removed the figures and stopped promoting itself under that name after failing to reach an agreement with the rights holders, and it now presents itself as La Aldea Azul, the Blue Village. What it kept is the blue paint on the facades.
Why is Júzcar painted blue?
Because Sony Pictures painted the whole village in 2011 to promote the worldwide premiere of The Smurfs 3D, using more than 4,000 litres of paint that reached as far as the church of Santa Catalina. The original agreement was to return it to white.
What does La Aldea Azul mean?
It is the name Júzcar trades under now, and it translates as the Blue Village. The municipality adopted it after dropping the Smurf branding, because the colour was the one asset it owned outright and could keep promoting without anyone’s permission.
Is Júzcar on the white villages route?
No. The official Pueblos Blancos route takes in 19 places and all of them are in Cádiz province. Júzcar sits in the Serranía de Ronda, deep inside whitewashed village country, with the distinction of having stopped being white in 2011.
How do you get to Júzcar?
By road only. There is no train, and none reaches Ronda either, so the approach is by mountain road through the Genal valley. Journey times rarely match what a map suggests, and stopping at a second village adds more than expected.
Go for the colour and the valley. The characters stopped being part of the plan a long time ago.