| El Cor de la Ciutat | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Genre | Soap opera |
| Created by | Jordi Galcerán Lluís Arcarazo Josep Maria Benet i Jornet |
| Theme music composer | Albert Guinovart |
| Country of origin | Catalonia, Spain |
| Original language | Catalan |
| No. of seasons | 9 |
| No. of episodes | 1,906 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 27 minutes per episode[1] |
| Original release | |
| Network | TV3, TVC Internacional and Canal 300 |
| Release | 11 September 2000 – 23 December 2009 |
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 last broadcast on 23 December 2009.[2] The show is the most watched fiction program in Catalonia, Spain, especially among female audiences, drawing around 28-33%[3] of the audience with as much as 40% during season finales. 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, Spain.
Eight complete seasons have been broadcast up until July 2008, with Season 9 currently airing. Five episodes are broadcast each week, one on each weekday, on TV3. With 1,906 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 and near season endings some episodes have had over one million viewers. 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 fallen into poverty by selling their bar in order to pay release charges to prevent 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 chef. 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 Noguera, now very ill, 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 infant daughter, Carolina, and his new partner Àngela Montford. This return to Sant Andreu opens the door to a new phase 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 Amorós Furió, Benet Sepúlveda Campruví (Beni), the Sendra sisters, Trini González and the Benjumea family).
The interior location scenes are recorded at TVC's studios in l'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona.
