Augusto Delkáder

Augusto Delkáder Teig was born in Cádiz, in southern Spain, in 1950. His father was Moroccan and his mother Catalan, and he was the fourth of seven brothers and sisters. His first contact with a newsroom came as a teenager, when he worked as a trainee at the Diario de Cádiz, the local paper of the Joly group.

He graduated in law and in information sciences (journalism) from the Complutense University of Madrid and extended his studies in the United Kingdom and the United States, where he was part of the first Spanish intake of the German Marshall Fund programme.

Delkáder rose quickly at the Diario de Cádiz and was its deputy director at the age of 23. He then joined the team that founded El País in Madrid in 1976. Apart from a period when he returned to Cádiz to direct the Diario de Cádiz, he remained at El País, becoming deputy director under the founding editor Juan Luis Cebrián. He was part of the paper's response to the attempted coup of 23 February 1981, when El País published several special editions overnight in defence of the constitution.

In 1987 he moved to the Cadena SER, which Prisa had acquired, with a brief from Jesús Polanco, Cebrián and Javier Baviano to bring "the Prisa culture" to the network. He first directed its news services, then took charge of all the group's stations and became director general in 1990. In 1998 he was made chief executive of the SER and Unión Radio, and he also led Prisa's media unit. In 2010 he succeeded Ignacio Polanco as president of Prisa Radio and the SER, and in 2015 he chaired the Spanish Association of Commercial Radio.

Colleagues remember him as a boss who gave his journalists freedom, trusted them and shielded them from political and economic pressure. He modernised the SER's formats and business model, built up its morning and night programming, made news the engine of its schedule and worked with Jesús Polanco to expand Prisa's radio division in Latin America. In 2021 he left his executive posts and became honorary president of the SER. In 2022 he joined the board of the Joly group, publisher of the Diario de Cádiz.

He also chaired the social council of the University of Cádiz, was a trustee of the Three Cultures of the Mediterranean Foundation and, from 2013, sat as an independent director on the board of the construction company Sacyr.

Delkáder was described as a man of few words, calm under pressure and an admirer of the journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales. He and his wife lost their daughter Alicia; he was survived by his wife and two other children.

Augusto Delkáder died in Madrid on Friday 23 October 2026, aged 76, after a series of illnesses. His family confirmed the death to El País, which published an obituary that afternoon, and the Cadena SER, La Vanguardia, Heraldo de Aragón and the Diario de Cádiz also reported it. No single cause of death was made public. Tributes from SER and El País colleagues described him as a great builder of teams who modernised Spanish radio. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Delkáder is remembered as one of the most influential figures in modern Spanish radio and as a teacher to several generations of journalists at El País and the SER. His saying "When in doubt, do journalism" is still quoted in the SER newsroom. His honours included the Medal of Andalusia (2002), the title of favourite son of the province of Cádiz (2005), the third Federico Joly Journalism Prize and the Heraldo Prize (2018).