Juan Tamariz died at the age of eighty-three at the „Clínico San Carlos” hospital in Madrid. The news was announced by his daughter Ana on social media, in a sentence worth more than any official obituary: „With enormous sadness, today I say goodbye to my father Juan Tamariz, an incredible man, deeply loved and respected by everyone.”

For generations of Spaniards he was not an illusionist. He was the man on television with the long hair, the hat and the laugh that burst out before the trick had even finished. From the seventies to the nineties Tamariz held Spanish television with cards and with holding a pause - two things no editor today would let him get away with.

What few outside the profession know is that he was also a theorist. He wrote manuals and theoretical works on magic, on something most people consider entertainment rather than a discipline with a literature of its own. Among card masters his name is spoken with a weight rarely afforded to any Spanish artist in any field.

In a 2019 interview with „El País” he recounted that he had studied physics while dreaming of cinema. Magic arrived before either: at four or five he saw a show in Madrid, and at six he asked the Three Kings for a box of tricks. Out of that box came a career sixty years long.

Of his four children only Ana inherited the obsession. Today she runs the Grand School of Magic that bears her name. That is the only kind of inheritance that means anything at all in this profession - nobody inherits a trick, you inherit only the patience to practise the same move a thousand times.

Tamariz did not have the calculus taught today in every content agency. No short form, no hook in the first three seconds. He had long explanations, a loud laugh and total faith that the audience would stay with him. It did, for sixty years. The question left hanging is whether anyone today would give him that much screen time at all.