The first pan-European kilometre-scale atmospheric chemistry simulation is introduced. The continental-scale air pollution episode of January 2009 is modelled with the CHIMERE offline chemistry transport model with a massive grid of 2 million horizontal points, performed on 2000 CPU of a high-performance computing system hosted by the Research and Technology Computing Center at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CCRT/CEA). Besides the technical challenge, we find that model biases are significantly reduced, especially over urban areas. The high-resolution grid also allows revisiting of the contribution of individual city plumes to the European burden of pollution, providing new insights to target the appropriate geographical level of action when designing air pollution mitigation strategies.