Next Friday, January 15, will be the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Casa del Cine de Almería. In this time, it has been one more space of the tourist and cultural offer offered by the Almería City Council. But that house has many stories within its walls.
What is now Casa del Cine was built in the 19th century by a Catalan merchant named Salvador Balmas. Her daughter married José Romero, a merchant with England, who enlarged the original building and had four children who adopted Romero-Balmas as their first surname.
The building had a vast estate that reached up to what were the facilities of Minas de Gádor. It included small land subleased to families. All this was seized by the Government of the Second Republic during the Civil War to be used as a military hospital.
After the death of Don José Romero, his widow Doña Josefina Sánchez decided in 1962 to rent his house to Sam Spiegel, the producer of Lawrence de Arabia. Peter O’Toole lived in another next door, in the same La Pipa neighborhood. Since then, this house was rented to directors and leading or prominent actors, as was the case with John Lennon in 1966.
After a series of vicissitudes, the house was left uninhabited at the end of the 80s and occupied by the children of a neighboring family of the place. A few more years passed and the Olvidó grew up alongside the urban planning of the area. Nobody had written about this house, now owned by a real estate broker.
At the end of the 90s, the then journalist J. Adolfo Iglesias discovered the history of this house, on the Romero road. His discovery was the answer to the question he had asked a few years earlier: “Why had John Lennon written Strawberry Fields Forever in Almería and not anywhere else in the world? ”. The house, known abroad as Santa Isabel, because of the motto forged on its gate, was the answer.
Iglesias decided to form together with the musician Chipo Martínez the association ‘Lennon Almería Forever and carry out regular activities to ask the local authorities for the conservation and restoration of Santa Isabel. To do this, they began to organize concerts with music by the Beatles.
One of the most exciting and full of meaning was a summer of 2011 in the already inaugurated Casa del Cine and in which it played again Strawberry Fields Forever, with local musicians, including Diego Cruz, the current Councilor for Culture.
Five years earlier, in July 2006, Cynthia Lennon, John Lennon’s first wife, returned to visit the house where she had been staying for three weeks between October and November 1966. The visit was made with great anticipation and with the company of the then councilor Miguel Cazorla, who was the one who during the mandate of Luis Rogelio Rodríguez, devised and carried out the Casa del Cine project.
The Lennon Almería Forever association selflessly carried out other activities with the City Council. Especially moving on the 50th anniversary of Lennon’s stay in Almería was the presence of Professor Juan Carrión, who sang Strawberry Fields with Professor David Millares’ children’s choir.
This and other symbolic moments in this magical place have been the cause of dissemination of Almería through the national and even international media. A great story behind this house.
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A room specially dedicated to John Lennon
The House of Cinema appears in the Strawberry Field Museum, in Liverpool due to the unique relationship between the city of the Beatles and Almería through this house, whose restoration is now ten years old. The room dedicated to John Lennon has great acceptance. It contains reproductions of material from the personal archive of J. Adolfo Iglesias, whose originals he wishes to donate to the Almería City Council. It is said that inexplicable phenomena occur in this house, told by the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who went mad in this house, and John Lennon’s wife, where strange noises and night visions were heard, related by the House guards. of the Cinema ,. In it it is said that a Freemason hanged himself during the Spanish Civil War, in a panic. It is also speculated that, being in Almería, the component of The Beatles considered leaving the group for the first time. Not surprisingly, a few days after his return from Spain, he met Yoko Ono at an exhibition in London.
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