The Real Places Behind Panem In Sunrise on the Reaping
November's shaping up to be a big month for Hunger Games fans. A brand-new movie, Sunrise on the Reaping, hits theaters on November 20, 2026, and the European destinations that play major roles in the film are worth a visit before the crowds catch on.
These include northern Spain, which provides a glacial valley for the arena of the 50th Hunger Games, and Berlin, Germany's capital city, where a disused airfield and an Olympic stadium are put to use as the Capitol and the arena, respectively.
The franchise's newest prequel follows 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy as he enters the Second Quarter Quell arena with this instalment, just like The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes before it, filmed entirely outside of the United States.
Shooting took place from July to November 2025 in Spain and Germany, returning to several places the earlier films had already made famous. Here are the ones you can visit.
Somiedo Natural Park, Asturias, Spain
The 50th Hunger Games arena that the second District 12 survivor enters into in Sunrise on the Reaping, was staged in the Valle de Lago, a glacial valley in Somiedo Natural Park in the Asturias region of northern Spain. The regional government approved filming from July 8 to August 8, 2025, in Somiedo and the neighboring district of Teverga with more than 300 crew members set up in a base camp in Pola de Somiedo, the park's main village.
A cornucopia was built for the film in a meadow near Lago del Valle, but to stay on par with the bright colors and glade-like arena, the design team added yellowing grass by laying artificial turf inside the starting circle and used computer graphics for the rest of the meadow.
The beech forest of Hayedo de Montegrande in Teverga and the Lagos de Saliencia were also used before the Asturias wildfires of August 2025 paused the shoot. The production even lent the region two fire trucks and six crew members to help fight the blazes.
Somiedo was declared a natural park in 1988 and a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Biosphere Reserve in 2000. It covers 112 square miles across four valleys and 39 settlements and is home to a population of some 370 Cantabrian brown bears, which you can learn more about at the Casa del Oso visitor center in Pola de Somiedo.
The hike to the film's arena follows the PR AS-15 route from the village of Valle de Lago to Lago del Valle, a trek of 3.7 miles each way. The Lagos de Saliencia circuit starts at the Alto de la Farrapona pass at 5,604 feet and loops 4.7 miles past four lakes, including Calabazosa (aka the Black Lake). Along the way, you'll pass teitos, the stone huts with thatched broom roofs built by the region's vaqueiros de alzada, herders who moved their cattle up to mountain pastures each summer.
Studio Babelsberg, Potsdam, Germany
After Spain, Sunrise on the Reaping moved to Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin, which co-produced the film and handled production services in Germany. The Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the regional film fund, put €800,000 toward the shoot, and the studio reports that scenes were filmed on its stages and at other locations in Berlin and the state of Brandenburg between August and October 2025.
It's the third time the franchise has set up here: the two Mockingjay films were co-produced at Babelsberg in 2014, and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes in 2022.
The studio calls itself the world's oldest large-scale film studio, a claim it dates to February 12, 1912, when cameras rolled on The Dance of Death, a silent film starring the Danish actress Asta Nielsen. Fritz Lang's Metropolis was shot here in 1926, and the stage built for it, the Marlene-Dietrich-Halle, is still in use. More recent productions include Inglourious Basterds, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Matrix Resurrections.
While the studio's 21 sound stages are closed to the public, Filmpark Babelsberg next door is not. The Filmpark is devoted to the studio's history, and its highlights include live stunt shows, a 4D cinema, the Street of Giants, and a backlot tour called Myth of Babelsberg that passes sets left behind by The Monuments Men and The Baader Meinhof Complex.
Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin, Germany
When the Mockingjay production needed somewhere to stand in for District 2's rebel encampment, Commander Lyme's control room, and a train station, Tempelhof Airport proved ideal. Now a disused Nazi-era airport terminal in the middle of Berlin, crews spent 12 days filming there in 2014 and came back in November 2025 for Sunrise on the Reaping.
Joseph Zada (Haymitch Abernathy), Mckenna Grace (Maysilee Donner), Ralph Fiennes (President Snow), Elle Fanning (Effie Trinket), and Glenn Close (Drusilla Sickle) were all spotted at the Tempelhof Airport that has also been used as buildings in the Capitol for its stark architecture and totalitarian .
The airfield itself, Tempelhofer Feld, opened as a public park in 2010, had 235,000 visitors in its first weekend, and now gets more than two million a year. It covers 741 acres, just 102 acres shy of Central Park. The old runways are now places where cyclists, skaters, and other outdoor enthusiasts can hang out for free.
The terminal building, completed in 1941, is three-quarters of a mile long, with 7,266 rooms and 3.2 million square feet of floor space. It became famous during the Berlin Airlift, when American and British aircraft flew food and coal into West Berlin after a Soviet blockade from June 1948 to May 1949. Two-hour Tempelhof Myths guided tours are available from the check-in visitor center at Platz der Luftbrücke 5.
Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, Germany
District 12 in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, including the Reaping square, the Hob, and the railway station where Lucy Gray Baird is taken away, was built among the blast furnaces of Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, a park created on the site of a closed ironworks in the Ruhr industrial region of western Germany.
The production used the Piazza Metallica, the park's central square of cast iron plates, cast 3,000 extras from more than 50,000 applicants, and built its station out of parts of the furnace plant. The Hanging Tree stood here too.
The crew came back from August to October 2025 for Sunrise on the Reaping, this time advertising for 4,000 extras in the Duisburg and Cologne area.
The Meiderich ironworks opened in 1901 and shut down in 1985, before being reinvented as the present-day 445-acre park in 1994. Weekend evenings are especially good to visit for the light installation, which washes the furnaces in color. If you're good with stairs, the viewing platform on top of Blast Furnace 5 is worth the expenditure of energy.
Set 230 feet up, it's a 252-step climb that's well worth it for the views all the way to Düsseldorf. Admission's free, and the park never closes.
The Boy Who Became Haymitch
Audiences first met Haymitch Abernathy in 2012 through Woody Harrelson's performance as District 12's drunken mentor, a man who had won his Games but lost everything else in the process. While fans were given hints throughout the original trilogy on his games, Suzanne Collins uses this prequel to explain why Haymitch is a vital character to the main storyline and Panem.
In Collins' novel, the Second Quarter Quell sends twice the usual number of tributes into an arena that looks like a postcard: a mountain meadow where the flowers, the water, and even the butterflies are designed to kill. Fortunately for fans, Somiedo's real meadows are a good deal friendlier.
Around them, a Spanish valley, a Potsdam studio lot, a Berlin airfield and stadium, and a Ruhr ironworks have all been stitched together into the newest corner of Panem.
Go see the film on November 20, and you'll recognize more of them than you might expect. And consider this your reaping notice.
