Unknown singers move into an academy with the cameras running, take daily classes from vocal coaches and a musical director, and sing live covers of pop standards each week while the country votes on who stays.

Televisión Española put it on the public network in 2001, a year before American Idol reached American screens, and the reach of TVE is the part outsiders miss. A public channel lands in every living room, so the gala played to the whole household instead of a pop niche, and the contest ran as a national argument about who deserved to win. The stated goal was modest: find the country's next solo singing sensation. The effect was that Spain watched a handful of amateurs learn their craft in public over months, a slower and stranger thing than an audition show.

Spain invented this before anyone else owned it. Endemol built the Star Academy franchise on the Spanish original and sold the format abroad, so the residential academy, the in-house tutors and the viewer vote all started here and travelled outward to the British and American shows that followed.

Faces recur across the run: Carlos Lozano, Jesús Vázquez and Roberto Leal on the gala stage, Noemí Galera and Manu Guix on the teaching side, and Chenoa, who came through as a contestant.