The cinema came to Tamaraceite thanks to Don José Cruz, del Puente. First he was on the General Highway, at number 92, where the Recreation Society was and due to the success, he later had to move to a larger building in what was then called Calle Perojo. At a time when most people did not have a watch, to start the sessions they called with flyers, on the third the film began. Tamaraceite had its movie theater at the end of the 20s, still belonging to the San Lorenzo City Council, which they called “Cine Galdós” in honor of the famous Canarian writer, demolishing some houses and stables that were in what is now the Civic Center de Tamaraceite, on Calle Doctor Juan Medina Nebot, who was the one who built the cinema, later passing into the hands of Don Manuel Marrero Barrera, owner of most of the capital’s cinemas, including Cuyás. This street is known to the neighbors until today as “The rise of the Cinema.”
The entrances had several categories of seat, in the first rows were the great common benches and which were accessed by the side alley, they were the cheapest. At the back were the single seat armchairs with armrests. On the upper floor there were two boxes with limited capacity, which were accessed by the wealthiest, the authorities and the friends of the usher on duty or those who “cast” the film, Miguelito García or Santiago Diepa known as Santiago Satán.
The first sound film to be released in Tamaraceite was El Último de los Vargas. The most successful films for the tamaraceitero public were those of Jorge Negrete, forming long lines to get a ticket. In its early days there was a function on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays with shows at 7 and 10 at night. For the children there was a session at 3:30 with films of Tarzan, Romans or the American West that we then put into practice at the end of the film through the streets of the town.
But the Galdós Cinema grew under the protection of the Recreation Society since it was used in many cases to make musical or theatrical performances. In the 1960s, Antonio Cabrera, Tiburcio Molina secretary, Lorenzo Martel vice-president and Fernando Arencibia librarian, and given the great cultural concerns of this Board, a time of great cultural activity was lived: plays, lectures, dialogues and the edition of the magazine Speak Words created by a group of six or seven people. As a result of the interest created by the magazine and sponsored by the Society, prominent personalities from the island’s cultural world came to Tamaraceite, such as Pinito del Oro, the writer Orlando Hernández, Mary Sánchez and the Bandamas, the singer Miguel Ronda and others.
Cinema was also transformed into theater with Mariquita González and later with Don Raimundo where zarzuelas such as La Dolorosa, Los Claveles, La Rosa del Azafrán and Los Gavilanes, among many other of the most famous of the Spanish lyrical genre, could be seen. According to one of those actors of the time, the artist Juan Alberto Díaz, to represent cultural events in the cinema, comedies, theater and others, it had to always be on Mondays because that is when there was no film function and they took advantage of Circuitos Marrero , owner of the Galdós Cinema and other cinemas in Las Palmas such as Cuyás or el Sol, authorized them.
Shops and bars were an obligatory place of passage when leaving the cinema or during rest, which was used to recharge energy while changing reel. One of the stores was that of Mariquita Serapita on the same rise from the cinema, where you could buy sausages, sausages, rice, bread, sweets, tiger nuts and lupines. Later, the reference store was that of “Santiaguito el del ice cream”. We always carried something to spend on some polo or sweets, never more than half hard. While the little ones went to the stores, the older ones did it to the bars like Cristóbal’s or Vicentito’s, because there were sessions for the little ones at 4 and 7 and those for the older ones at 10.
The Galdós Cinema disappeared at the beginning of the 80s when color television, the large cinemas in Las Palmas and the use of the private car and the bus that made it easier for this emblematic place to have fewer and fewer followers, displacing the public to other capital halls, especially with the creation of the Royal and Galaxy Multicines.
Apart from the Galdós Cinema, I would like to highlight three people who catch us very closely and who are closely related to the Seventh Art and Tamaraceite unites them in one way or another.
I’m going to start with the most famous of our country women, Patricia Medina, who managed to savor the honeys of the most authentic cinema as an actress in Hollywood. His father, Ramón Medina Nebot, who lived in a large house in El Puente, at the beginning of the 20th century he went to Seville to study Law and when he finished his studies he moved to England where he married and has three daughters. One of them, Patricia Medina, devoted herself to dramatization and began her film career in England in 1937 developing a role alongside David Niven and Annabella, leaving in 1947 for the United States where she had the opportunity to work with directors of the stature of Orson Welles in Confidential report (1955), and of making films like The Mitchell (1942), They met in the dark (1943), Weak is the meat (1947), Captain O’Flynn (1949), My mule Francis ( 1950), Fortunes of captain Blood (1950); the sequel Pirate Flag (1952), The Adventures of Dick Turpin (1951) and Lady in the iron mask (1952), The Thousand and One Nights with The Magic Carpet (1951), Aladdin and his lamp (1952) and Siren of Bagdad (1953) and The Ghost of Morgue Street (1954) among others.
As a child she came with her father to her grandfather’s house to the Bridge, where all the uncles and cousins met.
Another of our countrywomen that I want to talk to you about is Paola Torres, daughter of Federico Torres, well known in the Tamaraceite San Lorenzo Tenoya district.
He studied high school at the IES Cairasco de Figueroa de Tamaraceite, where I was a classmate, and then he moved to Madrid to study higher. She began her career in the world of fashion with Sybilla’s team, but she made it to the cinema thanks to Pedro Almodóvar with La mala educacion. He has worked with directors of the stature of Álex de la Iglesia, who earned him his first Goya nomination, for My Great Night.
Paola Torres won the Goya award for the best costume design for her work on the film 1898. The Last of the Philippines, directed by Salvador Calvo, in his second nomination for the Spanish Academy Awards, after his contest with My Great Night, by Alex de la Iglesia.
Finally, and I leave it for the end because of his youth, I want to talk to you about Joan Romero, a native of Tamaraceite, publicist, screenwriter and director of the SHARIF web series, among others, who was writing this story for almost four years.
He belonged for several years to the Grupo Cuenta Conmigo Animación that emerged from the IES Tamaraceite of the time, and which, encouraged by Conchi Moreno, began in the world of entertainment. Joan made a foray into cinematographic work with the work SHARIF and reaped some successes in various festivals such as the MLC Awards (Wisconsin, USA), where they were semi-finalists, in Prisma Independent Film Awards (Rome) where they were finalists, in the Independent Shorts Awards (Los Angeles, California) where they not only reached the final, but were awarded an Honorable Mention.
SHARIF is an atypical web series, out of the ordinary, made by Joan Romero, director and screenwriter. Together with Juanfra Domínguez, director of actors and his right hand, they achieved a mixture of cinematographic genres, of historical periods, of times, of spaces, of real people and fantastic beings.
This is just a sample that Tamaraceite has been and is a cinema neighborhood. Today we can enjoy magnificent film installations in the Alisios Shopping Center that delight the little ones and many older people and allow us to move to the most unexpected places without leaving the armchair.
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