It all begins with a mysterious voice mail from art history student Clara Torres to her flatmate David. Torres then disappears off the face of the earth, which in turn attracts the attention of David’s girlfriend, journalist Emma Clark.

Spanish-speaking listeners have long known what all this has to do with Switzerland and the role that avant-garde painter Ursula Blum plays in it all. The crime podcast “Blum” was launched in Spain in 2022 and was a total success. Since June 2023, people from English-speaking markets such as the USA or UK/Ireland now also have the opportunity to follow along with the exciting story. The reason: “Following on from the success of Blum in Spain, we decided in spring of 2023 to translate the story into English. Even two years later, Switzerland Tourism (ST) is still the only national tourism organisation worldwide to have ever produced a fictional podcast to promote a destination,” said Sandra Babey, ST Market Manager (until the end of 2023) for Spain and Portugal.

“Blum” is available on all popular audio platforms, including Spotify. The original Spanish version won various awards in Spain in 2022 and captivated over half a million listeners. The English version of “Blum” has also been a real success story: Since its publication in mid-2023, the story had reached over 210,000 crime fans by the end of the year. The project is therefore a good example of how good ideas for one market can be successfully adapted for others.

Cities and museums as story locations

The fact that the story revolves around the Art Museums of Switzerland and takes place in Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zurich, Lucerne, Basel, Winterthur, St. Gallen and Lugano was no accident. With the podcast, ST wanted to consciously inspire new guests to visit the cities and museums in Switzerland. Even if the protagonists in the podcast are fictitious, most of the facts mentioned in the story are correct. This mixes reality and fiction so skilfully that listeners were better able to imagine themselves in the story and were literally there.

Production in Madrid

The “Blum” podcast was produced for ST by podcast production company El Extraordinario in Madrid and written by scriptwriting duo Carmen Pacheco and Manuel Bartual. The version for the USA and UK/Ireland was later adapted for the English-speaking markets at the same location and re-recorded in English. Swiss cities are full of fascinating museums and other cultural attractions. With their historic and impressive locations, they offered the ideal setting for the story, Carmen Pacheco noted in an interview with Wallpaper. The two screenwriters travelled through Switzerland for two weeks for research purposes and visited all the cities and museums in which they set the story.