Juan Tamariz

Juan Manuel Tamariz-Martel Negron, known to Spain and to magicians worldwide as Juan Tamariz, was born in Madrid on 18 October 1942. His father, Julio Tamariz-Martel Fabre, was a military officer from Ecija; his mother, Maria del Consuelo Negron de las Cuevas, came from Algeciras. Family accounts place his first contact with magic around age four, when he was taken to a theatre to see a magician. As a child he begged Three Kings' gifts of magic sets, practiced on friends in the streets around Pintor Rosales, and watched circus and school magic whenever he could.

He joined Spain's Sociedad Espanola de Ilusionismo as a teenager after an early age-barred attempt, astonishing examiners who waived the usual minimum. Inside the SEI he met Juan Anton, with whom he formed the comic one-handed act Los Mancos, and found a decisive mentor in Arturo de Ascanio. Academically he studied physics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid for several years without completing the degree, then entered film school. He directed short films including Muerte S. A. (1967) and El espiritu (1969), the latter an early screen appearance for Carmen Maura. When Franco-era authorities closed the film school around 1970, he turned fully to magic. With peers he helped found the Escuela Magica de Madrid, a workshop culture that, with Ascanio's school of thought, became the backbone of modern Spanish close-up.

International recognition arrived at FISM: second prize in micromagic with Anton at Amsterdam (1970), then first prize in close-up card at Paris (1973) with the celebrated "Numero de Paris," a card-and-coin routine with harmonica and humour that Ascanio called among the greatest magic he had seen. Dai Vernon and later generations of professionals treated Tamariz as a fooler of fools. American stage magician Ricky Jay, asked in a December 2001 San Francisco Chronicle interview which living magicians would be remembered, named Rene Lavand and Juan Tamariz for "a wonderful sense of story and sleight of hand" and "elegant presentation." David Blaine later called him the greatest and most influential card magician alive. In Spain he remade the public image of the magician: jeans, unruly hair, thick glasses, top hat askew, and the signature mime of an invisible violin ending in the shout "chantatachan," insisting he preferred the word juego (game) to truco (trick) because trick sounded like deceit.

Television made him a household name. After early TVE appearances from the late 1960s, he played Don Estrecho among Los Tacanones on Un, dos, tres... responda otra vez, hosted and starred in magic strands such as Tiempo de Magia, Por arte de magia, Magia Potagia (with Pepe Carroll), and Telemadrid's Chantatachan (1992-93) with Alaska and Pedro Reyes. He appeared on NBC's The World's Greatest Magic (1994) and on British The Best of Magic, and remained a familiar guest on shows such as El Hormiguero and Nada x aqui. Stage shows, especially Magia Potagia, mixed improvisation, humour and close-up for theatre audiences across Spain and abroad.

As an author and theorist he reshaped how magicians think about audience psychology. Major Spanish works and their English translations include Los Cinco Puntos Magicos / The Five Points in Magic, La Via Magica / The Magic Way (false solutions and the construction of impossibility), Sonata, Sinfonia en mnemonica mayor / Mnemonica (his memorised-deck system), Por arte de verbimagia / Verbal Magic, and El Arcoiris Magico / The Magic Rainbow. He founded Editorial Frakson for magic publishing. Students and admirers across generations (among them Jorge Blass, Woody Aragon, Dani DaOrtiz and many FISM champions) describe a Spanish school of close-up that he and Ascanio anchored: generosity with secrets, insistence that spectators touch the cards, and rejection of marked decks and stooges as ethically corrosive.

Personal life was public in outline. Spanish biographical sources record four marriages and four children: Monica (linguistics, associated with the University of Edinburgh), Ana (magician and director of La Gran Escuela de Magia Ana Tamariz in Madrid, founded from the Magia Potagia shop in 1988), Alicia (musician), and Juan Diego. On 2 December 2008 he married Colombian magician Consuelo Lorgia at Segovia's city hall; he had first met her at a world magic congress in Vienna in 1976. In El Pais interviews he spoke of insomnia, of practicing cards almost on waking, of retiring "at 106," and of magic as keeping the inner child alive so that astonishment, "the beginning of knowledge," could return.

Juan Tamariz died in the early hours of 18 August 2026 at Hospital Clinico San Carlos in Madrid, aged 83. Family spokesperson Moises Rodriguez and daughter Ana announced that he died of natural causes, accompanied by his children, "smiling and at peace," without suffering. Ana thanked magicians, friends, family, the Ballesol residence, the Clinico and Red Cruz Roja hospitals, and ambulance crews. A funeral chapel was held at Tanatorio de San Isidro in Madrid on 19 August 2026; a larger public tribute in a Madrid theatre was announced for October 2026. The New York Times published Michael S. Rosenwald's obituary on 1 September 2026. Tributes came from Madrid mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida, magicians including Jorge Blass, Luis Piedrahita, Anthony Blake, Mago Pop and Randy Pitchford (DuvalMagic), and from audiences who grew up with his television joy.