El Palmar de Troya

El Palmar de Troya went on release last Thursday, February 6 on channel # 0, from Movistar +. Its first episode starts in March 1968, when four girls said they had seen Virgin Mary on the Alcaparrosa lands, in the Sevillian village of El Palmar de Troya.

Weeks later, several neighbors assured that they had experienced other appearances and that summer, an altar was built. It would be the first stone of the Palmarian Christian church. Those first appearances gave rise to a religious empire that expanded throughout the world, broke with the Vatican and appointed its own popes. Scandals, the shadow of sexual abuse, unlikely anecdotes and all kinds of accusations have marked more than fifty years of this religious order. Some consider it a church and many others, a great sect that is still alive today.

El Palmar de Troya is a series of four episodes that portrays, with utmost rigor, the Palmarian universe. Directed by Israel Del Santo and Daniel Boluda, also the main person in charge of the investigation, El Palmar de Troya tells a true story, unpublished, delusional, dark and surrounded by mystery.

For 93 Metros this series opens a new line of non-fiction documentaries, different from what we have done so far. Apart from having a solid journalistic base, it uses narrative elements closer to fiction and to the movies. We believe that this line has great potential.

This project is the result of an exhaustive investigation, which has allowed us to access exclusive testimonies of protagonists who had never spoken before and unpublished archival material. It includes the testimonies of Ginés Hernández (former pope Gregorio XVIII) and Nieves Triviño, his wife and former monk of El Palmar. We have tried to treat all these stories with the delicacy and rigor they deserve. It is not easy to get out of a cult and tell your experience to the world, you feel a lot of guilt and shame, so we can only thank everyone who has shared their experience with us in front of and behind the cameras.