WALK THROUGH THE STREETS OF FUERTEVENTURA
Streets of Fuerteventura Rosario Sanz - Fuerteventura Art has also found an important space within Fuerteventura’s Street guide. Often, creators are being honoured. It is the case for the streets (calle) named after Velázquez or El Greco. In other instances, they pay tribute to people from the present times, mostly Spanish people, such as the Street dedicated to the famous Canarian trapeze artist, Pinito del Oro, found in El Cotillo, very close to the harbour and Mirador Hornos de Cal.
Calle Pinito del Oro María Cristina del Pino Segura Gómez, known internationally as “Pinito del Oro”, was the youngest daughter of José Segura Fenollar’s large family. She was born in her father’s circus, who was himself the son of the owner of the famous Hermanos Segura Circus. Almost all her uncles, eleven of them, dedicated themselves to the show business and were born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Pinito was born in the neighbourhood of Guanarteme, and her poor mother, who had already given birth to nineteen babies, of which only seven had survived, didn’t want her to work in the
circus industry. However, everything seemed to steer María Cristina del Pino towards the trapeze, as her sister, Esther, died in a terrible traffic accident when the family was travelling from Cádiz to Seville. Quite unconvinced by her physical abilities, her father didn’t have any other choice but to get her up on the trapeze the next day to honour their contracts. This family tragedy totally changed her destiny and turned her into a specialist in the balancing technique. Years later, she became famous for not using any safety net in any of her acts, although she suffered various falls that could have killed her,from which she luckily recovered. While working in a circus show in Valencia, she met with the European representative for the well-known American circus called the “Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus”. To be able to travel to the United States and be employed by this company, she had to get married in Spain, as, at the time, women were not allowed to travel without express approval from their husbands. She got married to Juan de la Fuente, and although later in some interviews, she would say that the marriage wasn’t particularly happy, the fact is that her husband travelled with her during her whole career, and they were so inseparable that he would even hold the ladder so that Pinito could climb up to the trapeze, and they had various children. In 1955, she travelled back to Spain, where she was considered a celebrity and held various positions within the Price circus in Madrid. A year later, she acted as a double in the film “Trapeze” by the director Carol Reed, as a substitute for Gina Lollobrigida. She suffered from three terrible falls, the first of them when she was only 17and cracked her skull, which left her eight days in a coma. The same happened again
years later, and she also had to have surgery three times on her hands and feet that became curved because of the continuous use of the trapeze. Her last accident made her retire from the circus business, in 1960. She became a businesswoman and inaugurated a hotel named after her, in her home town. Eight years later, she reappeared again at the Price circus and retired definitely, in 1970, which coincided with the last performances of the circus before it was demolished. Mary Santpere also attended her triumphal farewell. Despite her incessant activity, she managed to write
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various books: “Trapecio. Conocimiento y técnica” (Trapeze. Knowledge and technique) and “Pinito del Oro. Memorias de una trapecista. Autobiografía” (Pinito de Oro. Memories of a trapeze artist. Autobiography). The latter was rejected various times on the pretext that the circus had already become unfashionable. She also wrote novels such as “Nacida para el circo” (Born for the circus), “La víspera” (The eve) and “El italiano” (The Italian), and even became a finalist in prestigious contests such as the contest of Ciudad de Oviedo or the contest of Blasco Ibáñez. In 2017, she was awarded the Canarian Gold Medal, which is when she confessed that she had only felt truly happy when she was on the trapeze. She died a few months later, on October 25th of that same year, from a stroke. She was 86 years old. A year later, the National Association of the Friends of Historic Theatres (Asociación Nacional de Amigos de los Teatros Históricos) created the Pinito del Oro Prize for the Circus Arts to pay tribute to artists who would perform acts known as “even more difficult”, a very common slogan in this type of show. In 1994, the Ayuntamiento of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria named a square after her on the Promenade of Las Canteras. The House of Culture of Albadalejo, in Ciudad Real, where her mother was born, is also named after her. Pinito del Oro is also represented in the Wax Museum in Madrid (Museo de Cera de Madrid) and although young people nowadays might not know the name, there will always be a grandmother who keeps on shouting at her grandchildren “get down from there, you will fall, do you think you are Pinitio del Oro?”.