Afundación Theatre

Overview

The Afundación Theatre is Vigo’s main stage, a 994-seat auditorium inside the granite building that Antonio Palacios designed on Rúa Policarpo Sanz and that opened in 1927 as the Teatro García Barbón. It is owned and run by Afundación, the social foundation of the bank ABANCA, which programmes theatre, classical concerts and free exhibitions here through the season.

Be clear about what a visit means. This is a working theatre, not a monument with a ticket desk and a route through the building. There is no general admission and no guided tour of the auditorium: the interior is something you see because you have bought a seat for a show, or because you walked into the ground-floor exhibition halls, which are free and keep their own short hours. Treat it as an evening plan rather than a sightseeing stop.

What justifies the detour, even from outside, is the facade. Palacios worked the front in white granite from the Castrelos quarries, curved and split into three bays by heavy pilasters, with bronze horses by Juan Oliveira Vieitez on the piers and stone figures by Manuel García Vázquez, known as Buciños, standing for painting, theatre, sculpture, literature, cinema and music. It sits on the stretch of central Vigo where the city put its early 20th-century money, a short walk from Vigo’s old town and port.

History

A theatre stood on this site before Palacios. The Teatro Rosalía de Castro opened on 15 July 1900 with a performance of Verdi’s Aida, went broke, and spent a period as a warehouse until the Vigo businessman José García Barbón bought it back and returned it to the stage. A year after his death, on 8 February 1910, a fire that broke out after a Shrove Tuesday carnival performance burned the building to the ground.

Palacios and the long build

García Barbón’s nieces decided to carry on their uncle’s project and commissioned Antonio Palacios, the Galician architect then at the height of his Madrid career, to design the replacement. Work began in 1913 on Rúa Policarpo Sanz and, because of the sheer size of the scheme, crawled on until the end of 1926. The theatre finally opened on 23 April 1927 under the García Barbón name, with the operetta Madame Pompadour.

Palacios put his effort into the arrival: a wide oval vestibule and a staircase of honour lit from above through a stained-glass window made by the Maumejean workshop. That sequence still works exactly as intended when you walk in for a show.

Savings bank, then foundation

In the second half of the 20th century the municipal savings bank of Vigo took the building on, intending to turn it into its cultural centre, and hired the Vigo architect Desiderio Pernas to rehabilitate it. Pernas kept Palacios’s scheme and adapted it to new uses, and the reworked theatre reopened on 22 March 1984.

The name then followed the bank. Caixavigo became Caixanova, then Novacaixagalicia, and the theatre ended up with Afundación, the foundation backed by ABANCA, which is why the historic García Barbón lettering and the current Afundación signage sit on the same building.

Visiting

The main hall is a 19th-century-style Italian theatre in the centre of the block, seating 994, with an orchestra pit for 40 players and a movable acoustic shell rated for 100 musicians, which is why it takes opera, ballet, drama and symphonic concerts without conversion. Alongside it the building keeps a 475-seat auditorium, seminar rooms and the library, all part of the same cultural centre.

Programming runs in season blocks. The theatre sells season tickets for drama and a separate series for classical music, announced in halves of the year, and single tickets for the same shows go on sale alongside them. Buying is done online: the theatre’s own event pages send you to Ataquilla.com for the seat, so check the listing for the specific show rather than assuming a box office will be open when you pass.

If there is nothing on and nothing hanging in the halls, you are limited to the outside of the building, which is worth five minutes on its own. The official site also carries a virtual tour of the theatre, which is a fair substitute for a closed afternoon.

Getting there needs no planning: the theatre is at Policarpo Sanz 13 in the middle of Vigo, a large number of city bus lines stop within walking distance, Vigo-Guixar station is a short hop away, and Peinador airport is 17 km out.

Tips

• Check the programme before you build a visit around this place. With no general admission, an empty listings page means an empty afternoon.

• Season tickets for the drama and classical series are sold in blocks covering half a year at a time, so if you are in Vigo for a week you want single tickets, not an abono.

• Big touring productions are often the only Galician date on a national tour, which is exactly why they sell out early. Book as soon as the show appears rather than on the day.

• The exhibition halls do not open in the morning on weekdays. If your only free slot is a weekday lunchtime, plan for the facade and come back after 17:30.

• Performances are staged in the main theatre, but talks and smaller concerts often go to the 475-seat auditorium or the conference room. Read the room name on your ticket, since they have separate entrances off the same lobby.

• Some exhibitions run guided openings with the artist, advertised on the event listing and needing a separate sign-up. Worth taking if the dates line up, since it is the one time the halls are explained rather than just open.

• Afundación runs sister venues in Pontevedra and Santiago de Compostela, so a show you miss in Vigo may have another Galician date on the same foundation’s calendar.