Europa Press

History

On September 23, 1953, Torcuato Luca de Tena published in ABC that Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, leader of the Soviet police, was in Spain following the death of Joseph Stalin. Since no one could verify the information, Luca de Tena was dismissed. When he was thirty, he decided to write books and pamphlets, founding an individual agency called Agencia Europea, where he hired his colleagues Florentino Pérez Embid, Andrés Rueda, Lluis Valls, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora and Javier García Vinuesa, with the aim of creating and spreading material containing pictures summarizing successful theatre plays or movies.

The name 'Europa' responds to the European vocation of this founding group. At the beginning, the name was accompanied with 'Documents and International reports'. Four years later, in 1957, due to prosperous business activity, Luca de Tena registered the company as Agencia Europa Press, as it is still called today. The first logotype represented Zeus transformed into a bull while he is capturing Europe, and in turn it represented Europe as an ideal political and social region.

This project was initially associated with Florentino Pérez Embid, Andrés Rueda, Luis Valls, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, Javier García Vinuesa, Antonio Fontán and Ángel Benito, among others. The agency has had four head offices, always in Madrid and is presently located at Paseo de la Castellana.

In 1963, Antonio Herrero Losada was named director, a post he held until his retirement from active journalism in 1989. That same year, increased revenue along with the change of the head office led to substantial growth in the following years. In 1966, Europa Press started its informative service, competing with agencies like EFE, Logos, Pyresa, Fiel or Mencheta. A key person entered in the agency in 1968: Francisco Martín Fernández de Heredia. His personal and professional activities held the company avoid a shutdown in 1969. At the same time, he strengthened the business project in the following years until it became the solid multimedia group that it is today.

Despite the political pressures suffered, mainly in the second part of 1960s, especially from the Information and Tourism Ministry, run by Manuel Fraga (he wanted the agency to merge with EFE and he even asked clients to end their contracts with Europa Press), the agency made it through in part thanks to Francisco Martín, who had been named managing director shortly before this conflict. Francisco Martín (1922–2011) continued playing a fundamental role in the company's growth over the next few decades until the end of the 1990s when he delegated his functions to his descendants.