Spanish-language crime dramas have been holding their own on streaming platforms for years now, and Gangs of Galicia was one of the stronger entries when it first arrived. Created by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and directed by Marc Vigil and Javier Rodríguez, this Netflix thriller (original Spanish title: Clanes) follows the fallout of a drug empire’s collision with ordinary lives. The six-episode second season runs approximately 45 minutes per episode.
Season 1 introduced Ana Gonzalez Soriano, a Madrid lawyer who discovered her murdered father had been living under witness protection. That revelation pulled her to the coastal region of Galicia, where she became entangled with Daniel Padín, son of a powerful crime patriarch. By the season’s end, Daniel was behind bars.
Season 2 opens in Dublin, where Ana has been quietly rebuilding her life with her mother and young daughter, trying to put the Padín world firmly behind her. Daniel walks out of prison, still awaiting trial, and finds himself pulled straight back into his father’s operations. Rival kingpin Macario coerces Ana into returning to Cambados to establish a cocaine production operation, repositioning both protagonists on opposing sides of a sprawling drug war. The tone shifts from Season 1’s intimate personal thriller into something larger, louder, and considerably messier.
Too Many Irons, Not Enough Fire
Ana’s reluctant return to Galicia forms the spine of the season, and on paper it’s a solid hook. After Macario discovers her location in Dublin, she has little choice but to agree to his demands. Her assignment: replicate an Ecuadorian cocaine operation in Galicia, generating six and a half tons of product per month. The problem is that Ana is a former lawyer, a woman who spent Season 1 trying to dismantle the Padín drug empire, and the writers never quite convince us that this pivot makes sense. The writing gestures at desperation as the motivating force, but desperation alone cannot paper over the logical gap between who Ana was and what she’s now being asked to do.
The Padín family dynamics offer more promising material. Daniel returns from prison with his ambitions quietly rearranged; he wants out of his father’s criminal world, a desire sharpened by the fact that the elder Padín never once visited him inside. Miguel de Lira’s patriarch remains unmoved, certain that Daniel’s loyalty is a fact of life rather than a preference. That tension, between father and son, between legacy and escape, had genuine psychological weight and could have served as the season’s emotional anchor. The writers set it up and then crowd it out.
Paco’s emergence as a threat within the criminal network is the season’s most underused idea. Positioning himself to dismantle the Padín empire from within, he had the potential to function as a formidable psychological antagonist capable of driving the whole season. Instead, the writers lose interest in him, reducing Paco to a flat villain with little internal complexity, a real waste of a strong setup.
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El Curilla (Luis Zahera), leading a rival criminal enterprise, senses weakness in the Padín organisation and begins making moves, eventually approaching Macario with a deal that draws Ana back into play. Officer Torres works in the background trying to contain a situation rapidly spinning out of control. The brewing conflict between El Curilla and the Padíns generates external pressure, but it also deposits more characters and allegiances onto an already straining narrative.
The family subplot, in which Laura discovers that Ana is her half-sister, carries genuine emotional potential. So does the introduction of Ana’s daughter as a reason she has so much to lose. But both threads are thinly written. The three-year time jump is handled too quickly, and the mother-daughter relationship never receives the screen time needed to make Ana’s choices feel truly costly. Revelations land with less force than they should because the groundwork simply was never laid.
Strong Hands, Weak Scripts
Clara Lago carries this season on her shoulders, and there are moments when her performance is genuinely arresting. She brings a lived-in toughness to Ana, a quality that makes the character’s more emotionally raw scenes feel earned even when the writing around them is inconsistent. The trouble is that Season 2 turns Ana from an active force into a reactive one. In Season 1, she drove the story forward with clear purpose. Here she spends most of her time being pulled between threats, with little internal architecture guiding her decisions. Her maternal instincts are introduced as a motivation, but the relationship with her daughter is so scantily developed that the stakes feel abstract rather than personal.
Tamar Novas, as Daniel, gives the season’s most grounded performance. His Daniel is exhausted in a specific way: a man who can see exactly what his life is doing to him and lacks, for now, the means to change it. The quiet frustration Novas brings to the role, particularly in scenes where Daniel is pressured into decisions he’d rather not make, is one of the season’s few consistent pleasures. His lingering feelings for Ana complicate his judgment in ways the show handles with more subtlety than it manages elsewhere.
Among the supporting cast, Luis Zahera’s El Curilla is the standout. There’s a scene involving a game of bingo that somehow becomes genuinely menacing in his hands, which tells you everything about what Zahera is capable of when the material gives him room. Macario, played by Ricardo Leguizamo, functions effectively as a threat but reads more as a plot device than a fully realised character. Berta (María Pujalte) and Laura (Melania Cruz) are given substantial screen time, though their arc feels like a detour from the main drama. Toño (Chechu Salgado) escapes consequence after consequence, which strains credibility as the season wears on. The elder Padín retains his quiet authority, even as his role contracts under the weight of the season’s expanding roster of rivals.
Beautiful to Watch, Exhausting to Follow
Marc Vigil and Javier Rodríguez bring a propulsive visual sensibility to the material, and the show looks genuinely cinematic throughout. The location work across Madrid, Dublin, A Coruña, Cádiz, Málaga and Cambados gives the season a geographical sweep that reflects Ana’s fractured, multi-country existence. These aren’t just attractive backdrops; the camera uses them to communicate something about dislocation and the impossibility of clean starts. The maritime chase sequence is the season’s technical peak, a kinetically edited set piece that demonstrates exactly what the show is capable of when its visual instincts are fully engaged.
When the writing falters, and it does so regularly, the cinematography provides a kind of structural holding pattern, keeping the viewer’s attention through rhythm and composition alone. That’s both a credit to the directors and a slightly uncomfortable sign of how much the visuals are compensating for what’s happening on the page.
The pacing is the season’s most persistent problem. Six episodes at roughly 45 minutes each should feel lean. They don’t. Stretches of melodrama, scenes weighted with emotional significance they haven’t earned, drag the momentum down. Then the show lurches forward, compressing important plot developments into a few rushed minutes. I noticed the uneven rhythm most sharply in the middle episodes, where the show seemed genuinely unsure of its own tempo. This inconsistency makes the season feel longer than its runtime suggests and harder to follow than it should be.
Guerricaechevarría’s screenplay introduces more competing threads than the season can hold together. The tone shifts uneasily between grounded crime drama and heightened thriller, and some of the more implausible elements, Ana’s assignment chief among them, tip the balance toward the latter without fully committing to it. Music choices are occasionally distracting rather than atmospheric; there’s a cue toward the end of one episode that lands so far off the emotional mark it briefly pulls you out of the scene entirely. The season closes on a cliffhanger that gestures toward a third season without resolving the questions already in play.
What the Past Costs You
The ideas running through Gangs of Galicia Season 2 are genuinely interesting ones. Both Ana and Daniel are defined by their inability to leave the past behind, and the show treats this less as a moral failing and more as an inevitability: a structural truth about how criminal organisations and legal systems work together to keep people trapped. Daniel’s situation raises a specific question: can loyalty to family ever be a genuine choice, or is it always an imposed inheritance? Ana’s arc asks something related: how much of your identity survives when circumstance strips away the role you built for yourself. These are rich ideas. The season nods at them and moves on.
Compared to Season 1, Season 2 feels diffuse. The first season had a clear emotional engine: a woman on a personal mission, a slow-burn romance with impossible stakes, a sense of forward momentum that carried the viewer through its more complicated stretches. Season 2 spreads that energy across too many characters and directions, and the romance between Ana and Daniel, which gave Season 1 its pulse, is still present but no longer central. Characters who felt like they were building toward something feel static here, or regressive.
What the season does well is worth acknowledging. Lago and Novas hold the centre with enough conviction that the emotional core remains accessible. The visual craft and location work give the series a cinematic quality that rewards patience. El Curilla’s scenes carry the kind of taut, understated menace the rest of the season could have used considerably more of.
Gangs of Galicia returned for its second season on April 3, 2026, continuing the high-stakes drama surrounding the drug trade in the Galician town of Cambados. Picking up three years after the events of the first season, the story follows Ana and Daniel as they find themselves on opposing sides of a brewing cartel war. While Daniel is pulled back into his family’s criminal operations for one last mission, Ana returns to the region to confront the Padín clan, risking her career and her relationship. The series is a gritty Spanish crime thriller that delves deep into family loyalty and betrayal, and it is available for streaming exclusively on Netflix.
Where to Watch Gangs Of Galicia Season 2 Online
Full Credits
Title: Gangs of Galicia (Season 2)
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: April 3, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: Approximately 45–50 minutes per episode
Director: Roger Gual, Marc Vigil, Javier Rodríguez
Writers: Jorge Guerricaechevarría
Producers and Executive Producers: Emma Lustres, Borja Pena
Cast: Clara Lago, Tamar Novas, Luis Zahera, Xosé Antonio Touriñán, Melania Cruz, Miguel de Lira, María Pujalte, Chechu Salgado, Diego Anido
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Isaac Vila
Editors: Mario Maroto, Cristina Liz
Composer: Sergio Moure
The Review
Gangs of Galicia Season 2
Gangs of Galicia Season 2 has the bones of a compelling crime drama but buries them under an overcrowded plot and uneven pacing. Clara Lago and Tamar Novas hold the centre with conviction, and the cinematography is frequently stunning. The writing, though, fails to match the ambition of its premise. Characters stall where they should grow, and storylines multiply without deepening. Watchable, yes. Satisfying, rarely.
PROS
- Clara Lago and Tamar Novas deliver strong, grounded performances
- Stunning cinematography and impressive location work across multiple countries
- Luis Zahera's El Curilla brings menace and texture to his scenes
- The maritime chase sequence is a technical highlight
- The central themes of legacy and escape carry genuine emotional weight
CONS
- Too many subplots dilute the central Ana and Daniel storyline
- Pacing is frustratingly uneven across all six episodes
- Ana's character arc regresses significantly from Season 1
- Key relationships, particularly the mother-daughter bond, are underdeveloped
- Paco is wasted as a villain, reduced to a flat antagonist with no depth
- The season ends without resolving its most pressing narrative threads
