Teatro Cervantes
Restored nineteenth-century opera house with an allegorical painted ceiling, once hidden behind a movie screen.
This guide to Teatro Cervantes in Málaga traces an opera house that spent years hiding behind a movie screen, a bar bolted into the stalls and a projector aimed where the stage should be. It goes back to the theatre's construction after Málaga lost an earlier stage to fire, architect Gerónimo Cuervo's design, and the allegorical ceiling that Bernardo Ferrándiz and Antonio Muñoz Degrain painted above the hall. You'll hear about opening night on 17 December 1870, when more than two thousand people packed in for Rossini's William Tell, and the slow decline, war damage and money trouble, that turned the theatre into a cinema. Look up: that same painted ceiling is still there.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.