General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Las pelotaris 1926

Las pelotaris 1926 is a Spanish-Mexican television drama series created by Marc Cistaré that dramatizes the story of the raquetistas, the women who became the first professional sportswomen in Spain by playing Basque pelota in the early twentieth century. Produced by The Mediapro Studio as a ViX+ original, it premiered on March 10, 2023 with eight episodes of roughly 55 minutes each, and reached European audiences through SkyShowtime on July 5, 2024.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Drama series, 1 season, 8 episodes of about 55–56 minutes; genre described as drama with adventure, thriller and romance elements³^•⁴
Premiere	March 10, 2023 on ViX+ (Mexico, Latin America, United States); SkyShowtime in Spain from July 5, 2024¹^•²
Creators and direction	Created by Marc Cistaré; directed by Jesús Rodrigo; written with Adriana Rivas, Javier Naya and Anaí López³^•¹
Lead cast	Zuria Vega as Chelo, Claudia Salas as Idoia, María de Nati as Itzi³
Production	The Mediapro Studio with TelevisaUnivision; executive producers Laura Fernández Espeso, Javier Pons and Marc Cistaré⁴^•¹
Filming	Shot in Mexico and Spain, including Mexico City's Zócalo, the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México, Tepoztlán, Las Estacas, the Plaza Berri fronton in Biarritz, and La Concha beach in San Sebastián⁵
Reception	IMDb audience rating of 7.2/10; canceled after one season⁶

Spoilers

Premise and characters

The series follows three pelotaris, Chelo, Idoia and Itzi, who fight to achieve their dreams in the 1920s, when men monopolized power in sport and society. As successful professional athletes, they must face the consequences of breaking the mold in a world where ambition and sexual freedom were denied to women: earning their own money, triumphing professionally, rebelling against mistreatment, and living their sexuality freely.⁴^•⁷

The three leads are played by Zuria Vega (Chelo), Claudia Salas (Idoia) and María de Nati (Itzi), supported by an international cast including David Chocarro, Marco de la O, Vicente Tamayo, Viviana Serna, Alex Onieva, Héctor Kotsifakis, Antonio Gaona, Krista Aroca, Eva Rubio, Jesús Castejón, Peter Vives, and Eligio Menéndez.³ The plot strands run in parallel between Mexico and the Basque Country: Chelo discovers she is pregnant just as she is about to become champion of Mexico; Itziar has just married when she reunites with a love from her past; and Idoia, in Spain, receives an offer to become the star of a Mexican fronton.⁸

The eight episodes carry the titles "Pioneras", "Punto de partido", "Un disparo en la frente", "Lo que hay que tener", "Putas", "La estilográfica", "El cielo de los ateos" and "La quimera".⁸

Historical background: the raquetistas

The fiction is rooted in a documented history. In January 1917 the Frontón Madrid opened, and in it sixteen women initiated a new modality of pelota that was played professionally by thousands of women over sixty-three consecutive years. Linked to a simultaneous betting system, the raqueta became an industry with more than thirty active frontons in Spain, Cuba, Brazil and Mexico, and training schools across the Basque Country, where most of the players came from.⁹ The businessman behind the launch was Ildefonso Anabitarte, a retired Gipuzkoan cesta player who introduced Basque raquetistas to the world with the 1917 opening of the Madrid fronton.¹⁰

At their height the raquetistas, also called "señoritas pelotaris", were genuine stars: their names appeared in the sports pages of 1920s newspapers, trading-card collections printed their faces, pasodobles were composed in their honor, and they were claimed by frontons in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Seville, Las Palmas and Palma de Mallorca, as well as abroad in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Cairo and even Shanghai. Most were Basque, left home at about fifteen years old, and became the breadwinners of their families, especially after the Civil War, when the sport reached its zenith.¹⁰ From the 1920s until 1980 they played under professional contracts, and some of them earned considerable money.¹¹

The profession also carried a social cost. Spectators were partly drawn by an eroticized image of women running and sweating after the ball, and the players were stigmatized by part of society, which doubted their professionalism and called them prostitutes; some fathers were ashamed to say what their daughters did.¹² Groups of raquetistas nonetheless pushed labor demands, seeking to be "more owners of their careers" rather than puppets in the hands of men.¹²

In the 1980s the women's game disappeared abruptly and was forgotten, even in the players' home towns; decades later, documentaries and fiction series such as Las pelotaris 1926 have tried to recover the history of the thousands of raquetistas who pioneered women's sport.¹³ The anthropologist Olatz González Abrisketa, professor of Social Anthropology at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), documented this trajectory in her book Raquetistas: gloria, represión y olvido de las pelotaris profesionales, showing that for several decades the women's success in frontons, salaries and audiences exceeded that of their male counterparts, and that national projects of the era erased them from the courts and from memory.¹³^•¹⁴

Production and approach

Marc Cistaré, known for his work on Vis a Vis, El barco and La víctima número 8, created the series as the first project of the alliance between TelevisaUnivision and The Mediapro Studio for the ViX+ platform.³^•¹⁵ Jesús Rodrigo directed the eight episodes, with Chechu Graf as director of photography and Fernando González as art director in charge of the period settings.¹

Filming ran on two continents. In Mexico the production used recognizable locations such as the Zócalo, the modernist Gran Hotel Ciudad de México, the pueblo mágico of Tepoztlán and Las Estacas; in Spain it shot in Madrid, Guadalajara and the Basque Country, with scenes at the Plaza Berri fronton in Biarritz and La Concha beach in San Sebastián.⁵^•³

Cistaré has described the series as rooted in real accounts but not a historical drama in the conventional sense: the personal stories were built from testimonies, with concrete events of secondary characters taken as relatives told them, while the dialogue and tone remain modern and contemporary.⁵ He also stated that the protagonists were deliberately written without heroic invulnerability, so that relapses and weakness are part of the story.⁵

Reception and availability

The series premiered on ViX+ on March 10, 2023 with new episodes weekly, and SkyShowtime released all eight episodes in Spain from July 5, 2024.¹^•² It later became available on Movistar Plus+ and other platforms in Spain.¹⁶ Audience ratings on IMDb stand at 7.2 out of 10, and the show was canceled after its single season.⁶ Critics noted that the sport itself carries real weight in the dramatic conflicts rather than serving as mere backdrop, and that the series leans on melodrama conventions as its protagonists progressively free themselves from the men around them.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026