Imagine not being able to eat even if you are hungry, only having freely available water, and having to undergo harsh physical and mental tests in the middle of the jungle. All of this to become the best contestant on an adventure reality show that is filmed in extreme temperatures and 80% humidity, in an environment where it is sometimes even hard to breathe. Under strong tropical storms, in rugged terrain and swampy waters, and surrounded by plants they have never seen before, native insects, rats or tarantulas. EL MUNDO has visited the recording of El Conquistador, a program that will premiere on TVE starting in September and that is being recorded right now in a wild and paradisiacal environment: the Los Haitises Natural Park, framed by the Samaná Bay, in the Dominican Republic.
After 19 seasons on Basque public television, where it has achieved audience averages that exceed 20% of the screen share, La 1 will now broadcast its national version for the first time. Its creators describe it as the “most extreme adventure contest on television”, and it is not for less. “You don’t win with resistance, you win with your mind,” says Amparo Castellano, director of Nonfiction Content at The Mediapro Studio, a production company behind the format. “If you don’t work hard and win the tests, in this program you don’t get to the end because you don’t eat and you don’t sleep. You have to work as a team, without camaraderie and a common strategy, going it alone, here you don’t survive,” she adds.
But turning abandoned islands into a television set is not easy. The program is recorded in more than a dozen locations located on different islets. We have to travel an average of 20 minutes by speedboat to move between one and the other, sometimes with the sea rougher than we would like. We find different scenarios converted into television sets where they have taken care of even the smallest detail. From a cave completely full of shells that will host the assembly where the nominations take place, to an area of ??impressive mangroves, a humid forest in which the humidity becomes oppressive and impressive beaches of golden sand and turquoise blue water that will host the tests tougher. Every so often they remind us to spray ourselves with insect repellent, especially when entering the most jungle areas, and they recommend that, despite the high temperatures, we wear long pants.
Before the recordings, the work behind a production like this is immense. It all begins a month and a half before shooting, when a team from the program travels to the Dominican Republic to look for landscapes that can become improvised sets. “We came and we found that the site is incredible, but there are no roads that connect some locations with others. We had to look for boats, boatmen and the closest hotels, which has not been easy because there are none in the area,” says Joxan Goñi, director of El Conquistador and one of its creators.
Later, they build the tests and the different camps in which the contestants sleep and set up a ‘dream team’ of 250 professionals. “We take the best workers from each edition, there are people who participated in the editions we recorded from Argentina, from Colombia…”, adds Goñi. The conditions in which they work are also extreme: long days under high temperatures in which they have to film from boats, in the middle of the sea with water up to their knees or going up and down rocky paths or muddy areas. The recording lasts six uninterrupted weeks, without any day off, and each program is recorded in approximately one and a half days.
During the visit we attended the filming of one of the 28 tough tests that the contestants will face in the national edition of the program. Such is the hardness of them, that El Conquistador has a medical team and a ‘tester’: a professional who is in charge of testing all the tests before the contestants carry them out to confirm that they are safe. They ask us to be silent: “They are locked up in a ‘reality’ show, they don’t know anything about the outside world and anything can upset them.” Around them there are dozens of cameras, filmmakers or sound engineers and, together with them, the two presenters who will guide the show on TVE: Julian Iantzi, the veteran, who has led the show for his 19 seasons on the EITB, and the new addition in the edition that will be broadcast by TVE, Raquel Sánchez Silva, who has hosted other adventure reality shows such as ‘Survivientes’ or ‘Pekín Express’.
For the first few weeks, before competing solo, the contestants are divided into three teams: Red and Green are made up of strong men and women respectively; and blue is a mixed team made up of people who “when you see them you would never imagine that they are coming to a program like this,” says Castellano. The teams are led by three captains: the former boxer Joana Pastrana, the former soccer player Patxi Salinas and the fitness trainer Cesc Escolà.
Unlike other adventure reality shows, the magic of El Conquis -as this program that has become a social phenomenon is known in the Basque Country- lies in the fact that everything is “real”. There are no scripts or rehearsals and the contestants do not have a second chance: the first version of each of the tests is always broadcast, come out as it comes out. This is how Patxi Alonso, executive producer of Hostoil (The Mediapro Studio) tells it: “We want to make a difference compared to other reality shows in which everything is rehearsed. This is something else, we have to push ourselves to the limit, that is the great challenge.”
Both he and Goñi admit that they are moved by the contestants when they surpass themselves or carry out acts of extreme generosity with their peers, but they remain firm with the rules of the program despite the heat, hunger or extreme fatigue they may feel. participants. “The difference between the contestants and us is that they have the whole day to observe us. They know where we are weak, which reporter is lazier, who they can deceive… They all know,” says Goñi.
During the month and a half that the recording of the program lasts, every day the contestants face a test whose result will mark their destiny. Depending on whether they win or not, they will receive food and it will be decided which of the three camps they spend the night in: the rich, the poor, or the one from hell.
The rich camp looks like a cabin typical of any ‘glamping’. A two-story wooden construction, decorated in a ‘boho’ style, located in the middle of a paradisiacal beach. You have to pay attention to see the hidden spotlights among its golden sand. Inside there are beds equipped with mosquito nets, kitchen utensils, food and everything you need to live. In fact, when we visited, the contestants had just left for a test and there were still traces of the food they just had on the plates.
However, things get worse if they lose the evidence. In the worst case, they end up in the hell camp, whose name is a true reflection of the reality that they find themselves there. They have to walk for about 50 meters through a completely muddy field. A wrong step makes you fall and sink knee-deep in the mud. Such is the difficulty that the production team uses another path – easier, although also muddy – to reach the camp. There, contestants can find everything from rats to tarantulas, not to mention gnats, tiny mosquitoes that cause irritating bites. Upon reaching the camp there are barely a few mats thrown on the ground, surrounded by mud. Without blankets, food, much less mosquito nets.
The production team highlights that in each edition they are in charge of cleaning the beaches and setting up both the camps and the rest of the infrastructure in each location from scratch and, once the recordings are finished, they dismantle it as if nothing had happened. Thus, they comply with exhaustive standards to respect the natural environment as much as possible. “When we arrive there is a lot of garbage brought in by the sea. The first thing we do is bring in a cleaning team that removes tons of garbage,” says the production team. In fact, they tell us that to build the cabin of the rich camp they have used recycled wood from a stranded ship. “TV is always seen as the bad one but here it is the other way around: we come, we clean and when we leave it is as if the program had not existed,” they add.
After 19 seasons in the Basque Country, its creators agree that one of the great challenges of this first national edition has been the casting. 1,500 people presented themselves, of which only 33 of these, 18 men and 15 women, have been chosen. “We are used to our people, the Basques, who are similar, and suddenly we went to Seville to do a casting and it has been quite a discovery,” says Joxan. We will have to wait until September to find out.
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