Cine Doré: The Palace of Sunflower Seeds

Why is it significant?

Here it is: a small, flamboyant façade in pink and cream, curving pediment, plaster garlands, and the single word Doré, as if a wedding cake had decided to become a cinema. Right beside it, the Antón Martín market hums along as usual.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here it is: a small, flamboyant façade in pink and cream, curving pediment, plaster garlands, and the single word Doré, as if a wedding cake had decided to become a cinema. Right beside it, the Antón Martín market hums along as usual.

Films were shown on this spot from the early 1910s, first in a simple pavilion. The building you see opened in 1923, designed by the architect Críspulo Moro Cabeza, at a time when going to the pictures was the cheapest luxury of the working neighbourhoods. Families came with a paper cone of pipas, salted sunflower seeds, and cracked them through the whole programme, spitting the shells onto the floor. By the end of the night you walked out on a crunchy carpet, and the locals nicknamed the Doré the palacio de las pipas, the palace of sunflower seeds.

Television and new multiplex cinemas killed places like this. The Doré closed in the 1960s and spent years abandoned, at real risk of being demolished. The city bought it, restored it, and in 1989 it reopened as the screening house of the Filmoteca Española, the Spanish national film library.

Today it shows the history of cinema, silent films with live piano, forgotten classics, retrospectives, often in the original language, and in summer there is an open-air screen on the roof terrace. Pedro Almodóvar loved it enough to film a scene of his 2002 film Talk to Her inside this very cinema.

And that is the thread of this walk. You started under the dome of a basilica built for kings and friars, and you end at a palace built for the people, where the floor was covered in seed shells. In between, you passed the inns, the markets, the tripe, the vermouth and the tenements that made these quarters the stubborn, hungry, generous heart of Madrid. The market next door is open... and somewhere nearby, a vermouth is waiting for you.