Viva el Español
Viva el Español was an Israeli educational program broadcast by Viva, a channel specialized in telenovelas, mostly from Latin America. The series was produced with assistance from the Tel Aviv Cervantes Institute and had two presenters, Argentine actor Gustavo Bermúdez and Deborah Adamson, who introduced the contents of Café Viva, a show-within-a-show that, in each episode, emphasized the terminology used.
Background
Most foreign programs seen on Israeli television are aired in their original language with Hebrew subtitles. Moreover, Israel had also received inbound immigration from Argentina and Uruguay, mostly from Jews. In the early 1990s, with the dawn of cable television, Argentine-born Yair Dori started bringing Argentine telenovelas to Channel 3, beginning with La extraña dama. The first telenovelas that came to Israel were Argentine, though titles from other countries came over time. With the establishment of Yair Dori Communications in 1996, he set up Viva, Israel's all-telenovelas channel, in 1998, starting its broadcasts the following year.Viva's success had an impact on the Tel Aviv Cervantes Institute. In 1998, it had 140 attendees, but the launch of Viva caused the number of attendees to suffer a significant uptick, to 600. In 2000, the number doubled to 1,200. For this purpose, Yair Dori contacted the institute to produce an educational program to increase interest in the language even further, as well as the culture of Spanish-speaking countries.