El Cor de la Ciutat

El cor de la ciutat is a TVC television soap opera first broadcast on TV3 on 11 September 2000 and last broadcast on 23 December 2009. The show is the most watched fiction program in Catalonia, Spain, especially among female audiences, drawing around 28-33% of the audience with as much as 40% during season finales. El cor de la ciutat follows the lives of the people who live and work in the neighbourhood of Sants and Sant Andreu in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Eight complete seasons have been broadcast up until July 2008, with Season 9 currently airing. Five episodes are broadcast each week, one on each weekday, on TV3. Nearly 1,800 episodes of the programme have been produced, making El cor de la Ciutat the longest-running television series TVC has produced. The show receives almost 800,000 viewers and near season endings some episodes have had over one million viewers. At the end of each season, a special night of programming is dedicated to the soap opera, known as La Nit del Cor. During the sixth season of the show, there was a change of neighbourhood for the show, as the Peris-Noguera family had to move from Sant Andreu to Sants, both of which are real areas of Barcelona. The family had fallen into poverty by selling their bar in order to pay release charges to prevent their son, David, from returning to prison. Having thought they had paid it all off, a large compensation claim was made against the family. The claim was made by one of the widowers of a dead passenger, killed in an accident involving a cruiser crashing into the front of The Chyme, a restaurant on the coast of Menorca which David worked in as a chef. In spite of the renewal of characters that the change of location has brought to the program, many of the older characters from Sant Andreu have turned up in episodes set in Sants - some of them, like Francisco and Remei even moved to Sants soon after the Peris-Noguera family.