The Spanish Government has relaunched a popular initiative aimed at ensuring senior citizens can have a nice and affordable day or evening out, with cheap tickets to the cinema under their Cine Sénior campaign.
With this program, people aged 65 or over can go to the cinema on Tuesdays at a reduced price of 2 euro, in any of the 420 exhibition spaces throughout Spain that have accepted the measure promoted by the Ministry of Culture. Together, there are more than 3,000 projection screens distributed throughout the territory. As a novelty compared to the first edition, tickets can be purchased both at the ticket offices of the exhibition halls and by electronic means.
The continuity of the measure responds to the good results of the first edition, as well as the determination of the Ministry of Culture to guarantee the activity of the exhibition halls as fundamental agents of the dissemination of cultural diversity, by recovering attendance to the rooms of people of this age group, facilitating their right of access to cultural diversity.
The maximum amount intended to finance these subsidies in 2024 amounts to 12 million euro, which represents an increase of 2 million euro compared to the previous call, 20% more. Of the amount allocated to aid, a maximum of 10 million euros corresponds to the granting of aid to the beneficiaries, while a maximum of 1.75 million euro will be reserved to meet possible needs for increased aid as a result of greater execution than expected.
Success of the first edition
The continuity in 2024 of this measure known as ‘Cine Sénior’ responds to the positive reception of the first edition. According to data from FECE, during the last campaign, Tuesday was the day of the week in which general attendance at the cinema increased the most. Specifically, it grew by around 50% compared to Tuesdays in the same period of the previous year: from 2.7 million total viewers on Tuesdays in 2022, to 4 million total viewers on Tuesdays in 2023. During the program campaign, which took place between July and December, the attendance of a total of 924,724 senior viewers was recorded, 25.5% of the total tickets sold.
For those with a preference for English language films, it is worth knowing that you need to look for the tag “V.O.” in the billing, which refers to the film being shown in the original version (in English if the original dialogue is of course). However, there are many cinemas now where headphones are provided to translate the film into a choice of languages, so it is worth checking with your local cinema as to how they deal with language delivery.