Casino Prado Suburense

In 1968, members of a Sitges social club organised something they called the First International Week of Fantastic Cinema. It ran in their own hall. That week is the direct ancestor of what Wikipedia's editors now rank alongside Fantasia and Fantastic Fest as one of the three biggest genre film festivals in the world, and the hall is still there, still a cinema, still owned by the society whose members thought of it.

That's the fact worth leading with, because the building otherwise reads as a handsome provincial clubhouse and gives no sign of having started anything.

An Indiano-era clubhouse with a projector in it

The society dates itself to 1877, though its own history page notes that statutes recovered in 1962 point to earlier activity under the name Casino Suburense. The building went up first — construction began in 1869, the doors opened in February 1870 — designed by Josep Maria Martino i Arroyo and paid for out of the money Sitges families were bringing back from Cuba and the Americas. The stage was added in 1890 and reworked in 1924 in the noucentista manner, with façade paintings and friezes by Agustí Ferrer Pino and Pere Jou.

Santiago Rusiñol, Miquel Utrillo and Ramon Casas all passed through. So did the composer Enric Morera and the dramatist Artur Carbonell, who mattered more to what the place actually did.

Film arrived early. The Catalan Wikipedia entry dates the first cinema session to 12 July 1907, with the first documented open-air screening in the garden in 1920; the town's own cultural guide gives 1911 for the first projections, and the two figures have never been reconciled in public. Either way the society was showing films within a decade or so of anyone in Catalonia doing it, which is why the Catalan Film Academy added it to its Cinemes Centenaris list in October 2020.

What it is now, and what it isn't

Around a thousand members. A cinema and a bar-restaurant on the ground floor, and above them a society that still runs theatre, ballet, chess and a serious Carnival operation. The Creu de Sant Jordi came in 2017; the Trinitat Catasús prize in 1988; a special award from the town council in 1999.

The cineclub sessions that started alongside the 1968 week ran until 1982, went dark for three decades, and came back in 2014. Current programming mixes original-version subtitled films with dubbed prints, live opera and ballet relays, children's and baby-friendly sessions, and the cineclub strand for the less commercial titles. Members get cheaper tickets, which is the whole logic of the thing.

The honest caveat: this is a society building doing a cinema's job, not a purpose-built arthouse. Sightlines and comfort are what a hall from 1870 offers, and the programme is a small-town programme with a good strand inside it rather than a Barcelona repertory calendar.

Don't miss the garden. The open-air screenings that started in 1920 are the reason to time a visit for summer rather than February, and they are the version of this place that no modern cinema can copy.

If you are here in October, the festival this room started takes over the whole town — and once the credits roll, the ten-minute walk downhill to Parrots is where most of Sitges ends up anyway.