Teatro Nacional Cervantes
Present in tours
Inaugurated in 1921, this theatre is one of the most important in Argentina. The Spanish actress María Guerrero and her husband Fernando Díaz de Mendoza invested their personal fortune in the project - and the Spanish king Alfonso XIII also contributed with logistics, ordering Spanish trading ships to carry material to Buenos Aires after Guerrero convinced him to make the theatre's construction a project for all of Spain.
Tiles came from Valencia and Tarragona; seats, mirrors and railings came from Seville; lamps came from Lucena; paint for the fresco on ceiling came from Barcelona the candiles, lámparas, faroles; de Barcelona, curtains and tapestries came from Madrid.
The design was overseen by the architects Fernando Aranda and Emilio Repetto, who agreed with María Guerrero that the facade should reproduce details from the university of Alcalá de Henares, with its Renaissance style and Plateresque columns. Almost 700 people worked on the construction.
The play for the opening night was Spanish classic Lope de Vega's La dama boba de Lope de Vega, starrting María Guerrero herself.
High maintenance costs forced Guerrero and Díaz de Mendoza to look to sell the theatre in 1933 and it passed into the hands of the state. A large part of the installations were destroyed in a fire in 1961, and the reconstruction took seven years. A new modernist annexe was incorportated during the restoration.
