inaugurated Archives

What is saving the box office are the premium sessions. That’s why Madrid has just inaugurated its first 70 mm analog projector

April 22, 2026 by usatoday24

Two David Pereira, father and son, two months have passed fine-tuning every last detail of the installation of an analog 70 mm projector in the Mk2 Cine Paz on Fuencarral Street in Madrid. The device weighs hundreds of kilos and the baptism was on April 10, when ‘Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair’ was released, the full version and with an interlude of Tarantino’s film. Madrid, which had not had a room equipped for this format for decades, thus becomes the fourth Spanish city to offer it. A family inheritance. The Pereira company is sixty years old and is now in its third generation. Young David’s grandfather was the one who installed the Cinerama system in the Proyecciones cinemas in the late 1950s, right in front of the Paz: it is such a specialized trade that it hardly has any replacement. The programming director of the Mk2 Cine Paz, Nacho Martínez-Useros, has confirmed that the projector is permanent and that it will be used in combination with the digital one that is still installed in that room. 70mm map. Until now, the only three Spanish theaters with 70 mm projection were the Barcelona Phenomenadistinguished in 2025 with the Carlo Lizzani award for best European theater, and the Palafox and Aragonia cinemas in Zaragoza. As already We tell about the premiere of ‘The Brutalist‘, the anomaly of Zaragoza was twofold: a medium-sized city with two 70 mm theaters while Madrid still had none. The programming planned at the Paz (Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ and the re-releases of ‘The Hateful Eight’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’) will try to soften that gap. The paradox of timing. The investment comes at a very delicate moment for the Spanish exhibition. According to provisional Comscore data for 2025theaters recorded 65 million spectators and 453 million euros in revenue, 8% less than in 2024. The first semester closed with slight growth, but the second sank 16%, dragged down by an October that was 28% below the previous year and a November that was 31% worse. If we compare with 2019the box office accumulates a drop of more than 38%. The premium format sweeps. The contrast with the global market is brutal. How we counted When talking about the clash between ‘Dune 3’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, IMAX closed 2025 with 1.28 billion dollars in global box office, its best historical figure, 40% more than 2024 and 13% above the 2019 record. In 2024, premium formats already meant 15.6% of the North American box officecompared to 10.3% in 2019. 7,830 premium screens have been counted worldwide in 2023. Plan B of studies. Although analog 70 mm is left out of this industrial race to release in IMAX and other premium formats, for obvious reasons of cost and scarcity of available copies, it does play with a similar philosophy: that of turning a visit to the cinema into an event. IMAX’s Omar Berakdar summed up the paradigm shift well when he said that audiences leaving the couch want something they can’t have at home. In Spain, where 87% of the films released in 2025 did not exceed 100,000 euros in revenue and only one Spanish title exceeded one million viewers, the operating margin is no longer in volume. Rooms like Phenomena They billed 1.12 million euros in 2024 with 114,534 viewers: A single screen is capable of competing with multiplexes. It is much more profitable. Go to the movies as a special plan. A projector like the Mk2 Cine Paz does not pay for itself with daily sessions at a standard price, but rather by turning each screening into an event, sometimes with an intermission included and an operator loading the second reel by hand. There is a model that recovers “well projected” cinema (fewer tickets are sold but they are more expensive) and that is in line with the “eventization” of culture that we have already lived with music. Will this, finally, be the rescue maneuver that will give the definitive oxygen balloon to the rooms? In Xataka | Spotify killed the record and the industry pivoted to concerts. Netflix killed cinema and the industry was left with a “space crisis”

In 1850, Almería inaugurated one of the largest hydraulic works in 19th century Spain. It was a complete disaster

March 10, 2026 by usatoday24

It is May 8, 1850, Níjar (Almería). Although the promoters have been trying for months, finally the inauguration of the Isabel II reservoir will not have the physical presence of the Queen which gives it its name. But they are not going to let that ruin the moment, their moment. We talk about what may be the largest hydraulic work of the Andalusian 19th century and one of the most ambitious on the peninsula: 35 meters of stonework built at will by more than a thousand private investors that culminate the old dream of the Duchess of Abrantes, to build a dam along the Rambla del Carrizal. A dam doomed to failure. Money in abundance. In 1821, in the heat of the mining boom in the Sierra Almagrera of Almería, Diego María Madollel He created ‘Irrigation of Níjar’ and obtained tax exemptions from the crown. The idea was simple: build a stone structure 44 meters long and 35 meters high with the idea of irrigating more than 18,000 hectares in Campo de Níjar and Campohermoso. Over the next 40 years, Madollel would learn that there are many ways to fail. The first was almost immediate. The second took almost twenty years and the third, in 1842, with the constitution of the Níjar Reservoir Company, seemed to be the good one. The businessman gathered more than a thousand shareholders from Almería, Murcia, Málaga, Madrid and Valencia (people who had become rich from the mines, wanted to invest, but did not know much about the matter) and got the state to declare the project a ‘public utility’; but, five years later, the project could not get off the ground. It wouldn’t have started, but In 1848 the drought began. A persistent, sharp and prophetic drought… but that promoted the construction of the swamp. Madollel saw his opportunity and began selling water rights. The construction moved forward, the Murcian Jerónimo Ros took control of the construction and by 1857 not only the dam was finished, but also a very complex system of irrigation canals and pipes. Madollel had built a hydrological Ferrari: but the road was not in condition to go more than 20 kilometers per hour. How much everything goes wrong. Despite the very long development, the promoters did almost everything wrong. To begin with, they did not carry out hydrological studies of the area and that prevented them from realizing that the riverbed did not have enough flow to fill the reservoir or to irrigate 18,000 hectares. Furthermore, they did not realize that the regime of the boulevard was ‘torrential’: when it rains, it does so torrentially and that causes enormous amounts of sediment to be washed away. By 1871, the reservoir was completely blocked. The failure was enormous. Or almost. Because, although it is true that today the prey is a relic for hikersthe truth is that Madollel did have some vision. Today the Campo de Níjar is the epicenter of one of the largest seas of plastics in the country. The hydrological pressures are the same or worse, but this shows that it doesn’t matter how many times the climate twists our hand, the man is there to try again. Image | ANE In Xataka | The reservoir that would “never be filled” is opening its floodgates: 23 years later, the largest swamp in Western Europe is completely full

It was inaugurated in 2014 as the largest solar thermal energy plant in the world. Will close after setting fire to birds

February 15, 2025 by usatoday24

The huge Ivanpah thermosolar energy plant, opened in 2014 in the Mojave desert, will close after just 11 years of operation. An accelerated end for its history of technical, economic and environmental problems. Context. The thermal concentration energy, once considered one of the most avant -garde technologies for clean electricity generation, is not going through its best moment. Especially in Nevada, where Crescent Dunes fiasco was already very popular. The concentration thermoso use thousands of mirrors, or “heliosteats”, which follow the trajectory of the sun to concentrate its light on central towers. In these towers, extreme heat is used to heat water and produce steam, which drives turbines connected to electric generators. The Ivanpah case. The Ivanpah plant was built with an investment of 1.6 billion dollars in loans from the United States Department of Energy and long -term contracts for important electrical companies. It was the world’s largest solar thermal energy Until the inauguration of Port Augusta In Australia. 11 years after its inauguration, the huge thermosolar has begun to close by not fulfilling its initial expectations. The lack of profitability condemned her. A succession of failures and complaints from environmental groups for their impact on wildlife accelerated their end. A complex technology. One of the main problems has been the difficulty of maintaining mirrors aligned precisely. Technology, which requires an exact monitoring of the sun, has proven unstable and unreliable in practice, says a CNN report. The maintenance of the complex mechanisms and the management of the turbines in turn generate high operating costs, which has made concentration thermosar loses competitiveness compared to other renewable technologies, especially photovoltaic solar, whose prices have collapsed. A Bird Incinerate Machine. Criticisms are not limited to technical aspects. The Ivanpah plant has been questioned for years for its environmental impact, especially in the wildlife of the desert. Environmental groups denounce the irreparable damage in the habitat of species such as desert turtle. But also The death of birds that are incinerated by intense rays concentrated by mirrors. A second Crescent dunes. The case of Crescent Dunes, also occurred in Nevada, reinforces this image of failure of the thermosolar energy. This project, which was intended to be one of the milestones in energy innovation and storage through molten salts, ended up becoming a multimillionaire waste. Developed By the Spanish group ACSpromised continuous production of electricity, even during the hours without light, thanks to the thermal storage in salts. In practice, Crescent Dunes never managed to deliver the amount of promised energy and ended up breaking due to engineering and management problems. In the shadow of the photovoltaic. In short, the rapid drop in photovoltaic technology and its lower impact on wildlife have obsolete concentration thermos. While solar panels have gained efficiency and reducing their installation and maintenance costs, thermosolar plants have lagged behind in terms of competitiveness, which has led to investors and electrical companies reconsidering their bets in this type of projects. In Xataka | The first solar plant of Central Torre to explode commercially is in Seville: a pioneer that has survived more ambitious

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