The Shadow of the Wind: Zafón's Barcelona

Before dawn one summer morning, Daniel's father takes him down the Ramblas and into the Carrer de l'Arc del Teatre, a narrow, gloomy passage under an arch. Behind an old door, a keeper named Isaac lets them into a labyrinth of shelves where forgotten books wait for someone to remember them. Each visitor may adopt one book and must protect it for life. Daniel picks The Shadow of the Wind by an author nobody has heard of. The library is invented; the arch and the alley are real, on the Raval side of the lower Ramblas.

Location precision: The library is fictional; the pin marks the Carrer de l'Arc del Teatre, where Zafón puts its door.

Visitor guidance: The arch opens off La Rambla near the Santa Mònica end; the alley is dark and quiet, so it's best seen by day.

Daniel grows up above his widowed father's secondhand bookshop on Carrer de Santa Anna, a lane off the top of the Ramblas. Over the years the shop becomes the base for the whole investigation: here Fermín, the ragged ex-spy Daniel takes in, finds work, and here the questions about Carax keep arriving. When his father checks the book's printing history, he finds it was published in Paris in 1935 and printed in Barcelona in 1936 — and that he has never heard of it. The shop is invented; the street and its medieval church are real.

Location precision: The bookshop is fictional; the pin marks Carrer de Santa Anna.

Visitor guidance: The Church of Santa Anna and its quiet cloister are reached through a passage off the street.

To learn about the mysterious book, Daniel and his father walk five minutes to Els Quatre Gats on Carrer de Montsió, where the dandyish dealer Gustavo Barceló holds court with his "bibliophile knights of the round table". Barceló, monocle and unlit pipe in place, offers to buy the book; Daniel refuses. The café is real: it opened in 1897 in Casa Martí, a modernista building by Puig i Cadafalch, and the teenage Picasso held his first solo exhibition here. It closed in 1903 and has long since reopened.

Visitor guidance: Els Quatre Gats is a working café-restaurant at Carrer de Montsió 3.

Barceló lives in a grand apartment on the Plaça Reial with his blind niece Clara, and Daniel, smitten, comes to read Carax aloud to her for years — until he discovers he is not the only man in her life. It is also under the square's arcades that he meets a filthy vagrant: Fermín Romero de Torres, a former agent who was imprisoned and tortured during the war. Daniel brings him home, and Fermín becomes his sharpest ally. The arcaded square, with its palms and Gaudí's lampposts, is the liveliest spot in the old town.

Visitor guidance: The square opens off La Rambla through arcaded passages; its lampposts are early works by Gaudí.

Following Carax's trail, Daniel climbs to the flat of Nuria Monfort, the daughter of Isaac the library keeper, in the small Plaça de Sant Felip Neri. She tells him only part of what she knows about Carax; her full confession, which he only reads much later, explains the whole tragedy. The square really does feel hidden. Its church wall is pitted with shrapnel: on 30 January 1938 a bomb from Franco's forces hit the church, then sheltering children, and a second bomb fell on the square, killing 42 people in all.

Location precision: Nuria's building isn't identified; the pin marks the square.

Visitor guidance: The square is a short walk from the cathedral in the Gothic Quarter, reached through narrow lanes.

In a grim old people's home in the Ribera, the Santa Lucía hospice, Daniel and Fermín track down Jacinta Coronado, who was close to Penélope Aldaya in her youth. Her memories give them the first real outline of the story behind the book: the poor hatter's son Julián, the rich man's daughter Penélope, their secret love and its punishment. The hospice is fictional; Zafón put it in Carrer de Montcada, a street of medieval palaces, five of which now house the Picasso Museum, a few steps from the church of Santa Maria del Mar.

Location precision: The hospice is fictional; the pin marks Carrer de Montcada.

Visitor guidance: The Picasso Museum occupies five palaces on the street; Santa Maria del Mar is at its southern end.

High above the city on Avinguda del Tibidabo stands the abandoned mansion of the Aldaya family, where Julián once fell in love with Penélope and where, Daniel learns, she died. It becomes his secret meeting place with Bea Aguilar, the sister of his best friend, and the stage for the novel's final confrontation with the brutal police inspector Fumero, who has hunted Carax for decades. The house is invented, but the avenue is real: opened in 1901 as a garden suburb for the rich, it was lined with mansions by architects such as Puig i Cadafalch.

Location precision: The Aldaya mansion is fictional; the pin marks Avinguda del Tibidabo.

Visitor guidance: The avenue climbs from Plaça de John F. Kennedy towards the Tibidabo funicular; the villas are private.

The fortress on Montjuïc hangs over Fermín's past. Before he became Daniel's friend he was imprisoned and tortured here for spying during the Civil War, and the castle stands in the novel for the cruelty of the war and the years after it. It was long a prison with a dark reputation: in the late 19th century its name was already a byword for the torture of anarchists. Barcelona's city council took it over in 2007, and the fortress is now open to visitors, with wide views over the port.

Visitor guidance: Reach the castle by the Montjuïc cable car or bus 150; there is an admission fee to the fortress.