El Cor de la Ciutat

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El Cor de la Ciutat

Genre	Soap opera
Created by	Josep Maria Benet i Jornet Jordi Galcerán Lluís Arcarazo
Theme music composer	Albert Guinovart
Country of origin	Catalonia
Language(s)	Catalan
No. of seasons	8
Production
Running time	25 minutes per episode^[1]
Broadcast
Original channel	TV3, TVC Internacional and Canal 300
Original run	11 September 2000 – Present
External links
Official website
IMDb profile

El Cor de la Ciutat (The Heart Of The City) is a TVC television soap opera first broadcast on TV3 on 11 September 2000 and continuing to date.^[2] El Cor de la Ciutat follows the lives of the people who live and work in the neighbourhood of Sants and Sant Andreu in Barcelona, Catalonia.

Seven complete seasons have been broadcast up until July 2007, with the latest season (Season 8) currently airing. Five episodes are broadcast each week, one on each weekday, on TV3. Nearly 1,500 episodes of the programme have been produced, making El Cor de la Ciutat the longest-running television series TVC has produced. The show receives almost 800,000 viewers (almost 50% of them living in Catalunya) and near season endings some episodes have had over one million viewers, more than is normal for this show. At the end of each season, a special night of programming is dedicated to the soap opera, known as La Nit del Cor (The Night of the Heart).

During the sixth season of the show (2005-2006) there was a change of neighbourhood for the show, as the Peris-Noguera family had to move from Sant Andreu to Sants, both of which are real areas of Barcelona. The family had made themselves very poor in order to pay release charges to stop their son, David, from returning to prison. Having thought they had paid it all off, a large compensation claim was made against the family. The claim was made by one of the widowers of a dead passenger, killed in an accident involving a cruiser crashing into the front of The Chyme, a restaurant on the coast of Menorca which David worked in as a cook. In spite of the renewal of characters that the change of location has brought to the program, many of the older characters from Sant Andreu have turned up in episodes set in Sants - some of them, like Francisco and Remei even moved to Sants soon after the Peris-Noguera family.

As a result of the show's move to Sants, viewers have been introduced to the stories behind characters such as the Galiana/Gutiérrez family, Mercè Amorós Sendra and the teachers at the high school there very quickly. Moreover, some of the new characters which have passed through the new series have been played by very famous actors such as Joan Pera and Àngels Gonyalons, who both made two special collaborations during the seventh season of the show (2006 - 2007).

Two years after leaving Sant Andreu, the life of the Peris-Noguera family has changed a lot. Cinta, now very ill and with a low life expectancy, decides to do everything possible for the Peris-Noguera family to get their bar back in Sant Andreu. The death of his wife makes Pere Peris reassess his life and so he decides start again in his lifelong neighbourhood with his new partner Àngela and their daughter, Carolina. This return to Sant Andreu opens the door to a new stage of the series. From 12 September 2007, the series is broadcast in high definition, incorporates ten new actors and the majority of characters are from Sant Andreu again whilst retaining some of the more popular protagonists of Sants (such as Fidel, Beni, the Sendra sisters (Maise, Helga and Irene), Trini and the Benjumea family).

The interior location scenes are recorded at TVC's studios in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona.

[edit] La Nit del Cor

La Nit del Cor (The Night of The Heart) is an evening of programming and live content associated with the show. The special evening of programming takes place on the Sunday evening following the broadcast of the final episode of a season of the soap opera.

The evening begins with an hour-long special episode of the soap opera which wraps up many of the storylines creating during the past season whilst also creating a cliffhanger ending which will be returned to during the next series.

After the hour-long special, a special evening is held at the National Theatre of Catalonia (TNC), Barcelona, which is attended by all the actors and actresses from the cast of the series, including a few that will join the series during the next season as new characters. Prizes are also awarded to actors, actresses and scriptwriters throughout the evening. Up until 2004, a different television personality presented the awards each year. In both 2005 and 2006, the awards were presented by Albert Om, Cristina Puig and Màbel Martí who are all from the television programme El Club, broadcast on the same channel as El Cor de la Ciutat, TV3.