Lovesick Filming Locations

The old streets, grand churches and seemingly untouched houses in Netflix’s Lovesick are not the product of one enormous studio backlot. The Mexican period drama, released under its original title Mal de amores in Spanish-speaking markets, was filmed extensively across Puebla and San Luis Potosí, with additional work in Mexico City and several smaller communities around Puebla.

Puebla provided the production’s most recognizable historical architecture, while rural locations such as Atlixco and Tilapa supplied landscapes that could convincingly pass for Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. San Luis Potosí was equally important, particularly when the story expanded beyond Emilia Sauri’s hometown. Even the Sauri family home is a composite, joining a real exterior in San Luis Potosí to interiors constructed hundreds of kilometers away in Mexico City.

Related: Lovesick Ending Explained: Who Does Emilia End Up With, Daniel or Zavalza?

Related: Is Emilia Sauri a Real Person? Is Netflix’s Lovesick Based on a True Story?

Puebla’s Historic Center Is the Heart of Lovesick

The Historic Center of Puebla was one of the principal filming locations for Lovesick. It was an obvious choice given that much of Ángeles Mastretta’s story is rooted in Puebla and the city’s surviving colonial architecture requires considerably less visual disguise than a modern urban neighborhood.

Production moved through the Zócalo, 3 Oriente and other streets surrounding the city’s historic core, temporarily adding carriages, extras in period clothing and early 20th-century street dressing. The Puebla Metropolitan Cathedral, Palacio Municipal and Plaza de la Democracia were among the prominent buildings and public spaces used during filming.

Several interiors are even easier to recognize. Netflix filmed at the extraordinary Biblioteca Palafoxiana, whose rows of antique books and carved wooden shelves already look like a meticulously designed period set. The production also used the Church of Santo Domingo and its famous Capilla del Rosario, one of Puebla’s great Baroque landmarks.

Other Puebla sites reported during the shoot included the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, Ex-Convento del Carmen and Iglesia de La Merced. Rather than treating Puebla as a single establishing location, the crew effectively assembled different corners of the city into the fictional everyday world occupied by Emilia, Daniel and Zavalza.

Atlixco and the Exhacienda San Mateo Became Major Sets

Atlixco was another of the production’s most important Puebla locations. The Pueblo Mágico appears through its historic architecture, streets and surrounding natural landscapes, all of which suited a story moving between private romance and revolutionary Mexico.

A particularly important site was the Exhacienda San Mateo, an old property located close to central Atlixco. Production crews occupied the estate during the 2025 filming period, using its aged walls, courtyards and gardens to create spaces that would have been difficult to reproduce convincingly from scratch.

Filming around Atlixco was extensive enough that local reports documented production activity continuing through January and February 2025. The series also made use of Puebla’s sugarcane fields, giving the rural portions of Lovesick a very different visual character from its elegant urban sequences.

Tilapa, Cuautinchán and Chipilo

The shoot went considerably farther into Puebla than the best-known tourist locations. San Félix Rijo, a community in the municipality of Tilapa, became another notable production base.

Two local landscapes known as La Toma and La Presa were used there. Filming was scheduled for several days in February 2025 and involved roughly 250 local extras, giving the production the scale required for outdoor and period crowd sequences.

Cuautinchán also hosted filming, with casting activity there documented as early as late 2024. Chipilo, in the municipality of San Gregorio Atzompa, was likewise included among the production locations announced by the filmmakers.

The Ex-Hacienda de Chautla was also named in early production reporting as one of the intended Puebla locations. Because later post-release accounts have focused much more heavily on Atlixco, central Puebla and Tilapa, it is safest to describe Chautla as a reported production location rather than assign a specific scene to it without confirmation.

San Luis Potosí Stands In for a Changing Mexico

San Luis Potosí became the second major state used for Lovesick. Filming took place there from late February into early March 2025, with the historic center heavily transformed for the period drama.

The production began its San Luis Potosí work at the Museo Nacional de la Máscara. Crews then worked along streets including Hermenegildo Galeana, Universidad and 5 de Mayo, while additional filming activity was documented around Melchor Ocampo and the Plaza de Aránzazu area.

One of the largest transformations took place on Calzada de Guadalupe. Modern traffic was removed, vintage vehicles and costumed extras were brought in, and period details were installed along the avenue.

The location was not always meant to represent San Luis Potosí on screen. The cast has revealed that portions of the city were transformed to recreate Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma during Francisco I. Madero’s historic entrance into the capital. It is a good example of how Lovesick uses one Mexican city to represent another without relying entirely on digital environments.

Production reports also identified Plaza de Aránzazu, Callejón de los Artesanos and Jardín de San Francisco among the areas considered or used during the San Luis Potosí filming period.

Cerro de San Pedro and Mexquitic Provided Rural San Luis Locations

The production did not remain inside the state capital. Cerro de San Pedro and Mexquitic de Carmona were both officially identified by San Luis Potosí tourism authorities as Lovesick filming locations.

Cerro de San Pedro offered narrow roads, stone buildings and the rugged setting of a historic mining community. It is visually far removed from Puebla’s ornate civic buildings, making it useful for sequences requiring a harsher and less urban environment.

Mexquitic supplied another mixture of historic architecture and countryside. Exact individual buildings used there have not been publicly identified, but the municipality’s involvement in the production was confirmed while filming was underway.

Where Is Casa Sauri in Real Life?

One of Lovesick’s most convincing locations does not actually exist as a complete house.

Production designer Sandra Cabriada and set decorator Roxanna Lojero created Casa Sauri through what they called an “invisible stitching” technique. The exterior facade was filmed at a real property in San Luis Potosí, selected because it was broad enough and largely free of distracting modern elements.

Walk through that doorway on screen, however, and the actors are suddenly in Mexico City.

The interiors associated with the Sauri household were constructed at Foros Maravilla in Mexico City. The elaborate set included the Botica Sauri, kitchen, bedrooms, courtyard, fountains and family spaces. Construction reportedly took about five months, allowing the production to control lighting, weather and every historical detail.

That explains why the house feels like a genuine historic property even when cameras move deep inside it. The exterior and interior are physically hundreds of kilometers apart.

The Palacio de Correos

Lovesick also filmed at the Palacio de Correos de México in Mexico City’s Historic Center.

Director Catalina Aguilar Mastretta had a particularly personal reason for choosing it. She has recalled visiting the building when she was around 12 or 13 and imagining that, if her mother’s novel were ever adapted, a scene involving sending a letter should be filmed there.

Years later, she wrote such a scene into the adaptation and returned with the cast and production crew to shoot it inside the Palacio Postal.

The building’s grand staircases, ironwork and early 20th-century architecture required very little alteration, making it one of the most naturally suited locations in the entire series.

Lovesick Was Built From Pieces of Real Mexico

Rather than search for one perfectly preserved town, the Lovesick team treated Mexico itself as a collection of architectural pieces. Puebla supplied churches, libraries, plazas and city streets. Atlixco and the communities south of Puebla added estates and countryside. San Luis Potosí provided another urban identity, as well as mining and rural settings through Cerro de San Pedro and Mexquitic. Mexico City supplied both the Palacio de Correos and the controlled studio spaces needed for Casa Sauri.

That approach also explains why certain places in the series can be difficult to identify. A character may walk toward a real facade in San Luis Potosí and, after one edit, enter a room built inside a Mexico City soundstage. Lovesick’s Mexico is therefore geographically real, even when the location we see on screen is assembled from several different places.