The Magic Memories Special – Juan Tamariz

Juan Tamariz (1942–2026)

“It always pains me when a man of talent dies, for the world has greater need of such men than heaven.” — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I am writing these lines only a few hours after receiving the sad news of the passing of my friend and mentor Juan Tamariz. He died in the early hours of August 18, 2026, at the age of eighty-three, in Madrid, Spain.

Before anything else, I would like to express my heartfelt condolences to his wife Consuelo, his daughters Monica, Ana, and Alicia, his son Juan Diego, and his large family. In these difficult hours, the world of magic falls silent, and our thoughts are with you.

Juan, Juan, Juan

It is not difficult to write about Juan Tamariz, for he was a genius and arguably the most influential voice in the world of magic over the past several decades.

Within minutes of the sad news spreading like wildfire throughout the known universe, thousands who hardly knew him—perhaps they had attended a few of his lectures or seen a few of his shows—were already writing words about him, some brief, some expansive.

Allow me to add a few remarks of my own, for I may say that Juan Tamariz—his friendship and his teachings—accompanied me throughout my entire life in magic. This year marks exactly fifty-three years since we first met… a deck of cards with a Joker, just to be on the safe side.

And few knew him as I did. I do not write this to boast, nor to bask in the reflected glory of a star at the moment of his passing, but because over the course of decades I experienced Juan Tamariz—the artist, the author, the inventor, the family man, and all the many other things he was—and, with him and thanks to him, I grew both magically and as a human being.

1978–2026–????

I first met Juan Tamariz in 1978, when I was nineteen, through his friend and teacher Juan Antón, at the Magic Up-to-date convention in Düsseldorf.

We met again the following year, in 1979, at the FISM World Congress in Brussels, and then once more that December at Ron MacMillan’s convention in London. He invited me to visit him in Madrid. I spent a week at his home with his family—his then-wife Mari Pura and his two daughters, Monica and Ana.

From then until the year of the pandemic, 2020, I spent at least one week with him every year, and from 1979 onward I attended almost every one of the Jornadas Cartomágicas de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. These gatherings, known simply as the Jornadas, were only one facet of the Escuela Mágica de Madrid (EMM)—not a school of magic of the kind we have so many of today, but a genuine school of thought. Juan Tamariz was the original driving force behind this movement, and he wrote a manifesto for it, inspired by André Breton, who had done the same for Surrealism.

Juan Tamariz (1942–2242)

Officially, Juan Tamariz is said to have died at the age of eighty-three, but in real time he was three hundred years old—at least. This requires an explanation.

For in the eighty-three years we were privileged to have him among us, he accomplished several times what even the best among us have accomplished, or ever will.

As a creative mind, he conceived more in card magic—and not only there!—than a dozen of our finest inventors put together.

As a live performer, he gave more shows than ten professionals, ranging from children’s performances to high-level corporate events, from the small pub to the world-class cruise ship, from private parties to major theaters.

As a television magician, he made his first appearance as early as 1961. Then, in 1975, together with Julio Carabias, he had his first television series of his own, Tiempo de magia. Numerous others followed, until Tchan-ta-ta-chan in the early 1990s marked his farewell to television. Hardly any of the famous television magicians has performed as many shows, with as much different material, as Juan Tamariz.

As a theater magician, following his retirement from television, he played more theaters than most stage magicians in the history of our art, from intimate venues to large arenas.

As a lecturer, he gave more lectures, workshops, masterclasses, and the like than even the best lecturers among us will ever give. And I am not even counting the thousands of private seminars he gave to me and countless others, which he invariably described as friendly get-togethers devoted to magic, but which in truth were priceless masterclasses.

To these must be added the many talks on magic he gave to lay audiences. He could have done far more of those, it must be said, for there was no shortage of invitations, particularly from universities but also from business conferences, as I know firsthand. Often, however, they came to nothing because such talks would have had to take place during normal lecture hours, in the morning or afternoon, and that conflicted with our hero’s waking hours.

He maintained a decidedly eccentric daily rhythm: during the last decade of my visits, his day began at around 6 p.m. and ended at about 11 a.m. the following morning. I usually managed to hold out until six in the morning… after which I needed several days at home to recover.

And then there is the author. Hardly anyone has published as much as Juan Tamariz, and (almost always) without a ghostwriter: first lecture notes, monographs, and articles—countless of them for the Circular, the publication of the EMM—then books for the general public, but above all specialist literature for us magicians. The best of us cannot compete.

The recently published six-volume series Letters from Juan, issued by Penguin Magic, also offers a small glimpse—and I mean a very small one—into his private notes. I doubt that anyone in the history of magic has ever written so much, and so much that was so good.

So, let us do the arithmetic. If we add together all his achievements as an inventor, performer, television and theater magician, lecturer, and so forth, we arrive at a lifespan of approximately three hundred years (rounding up slightly…).

The Entire Circumference of Genius

During one of our sessions on the veranda of his house in San Fernando, near Cádiz, Spain, where for decades I would spend a week with him every summer—in earlier years it had been Madrid, Granada, El Escorial, and Torrelodones—it was already early morning. The deck had been resting for a while, and our conversation had drifted into other spheres of life: art, literature, philosophy.

Juan recited from memory a poem by the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, written in memoriam Alfonso Reyes. Here is the Spanish original:

Reyes, la indescifrable Providencia
que administra lo pródigo y lo parco
nos dio a los unos el sector o el arco,
pero a ti la total circunferencia.

And an English translation:

Reyes, the indecipherable Providence
that administers the lavish and the sparse,
gave some of us the sector or the arc,
but to you, the entire circumference.

I leave the interpretation to you, dear reader.

At the time, this beautiful poem took me quite by surprise, for Juan had quite obviously described himself.

Few will disagree with me when I say that there are several geniuses in our world of magic—not many, but several—yet only very few whom I would call a “complete genius.”

What may sound like a pleonasm is nothing of the kind. Most of the geniuses I could name—René Lavand, Slydini, Paul Daniels—were geniuses in particular areas, but not in the comprehensive sense in which I use the word for Tamariz. Some of us may excel in one particular field—as a performer, inventor, or author—and thus possess the “sector” or the “arc.” But he had the entire circumference.

For a moment I remember thinking, “The man certainly has an ego.”

After a little reflection, however, I arrived at a broader definition of that usually rather negatively charged concept.

It is said that it takes a talented person to recognize a genius. I have the audacity to credit myself with enough talent to call Juan Tamariz a genius—not as the empty cliché one so often encounters, but from firsthand knowledge.

When we speak of selfish or egocentric people, we usually mean individuals who place themselves at the center and regard the rest of the world as decoration.

Juan Tamariz was certainly not immune to admiration—and he deserved admiration more than most—but I have never encountered anyone with such a healthy ego. Although fully aware of his stature, he always treated those around him with empathy and respect. He never spoke about himself or his achievements; indeed, he was reserved and—hard as this may be to believe if you ever saw him perform—even a rather shy man.

To this day, I find it difficult to understand how he could devote so much time to welcoming fellow magicians into his home, doing magic with them, eating with them—we both loved gastronomy!—and teaching them, while at the same time accomplishing the enormous body of work described above.

And never did I have the impression that he was even remotely stressed.

I say this from having witnessed him in many situations: accompanying him to important performances before audiences of a thousand people, to television studios, to lectures at world congresses, and much more.

A Preliminary Conclusion

I have tried to write something different from most of the comments one finds on the Internet, and I hope I have succeeded.

There is, of course, much more to say, and some of us who knew Juan Tamariz well will say it, for we had the great good fortune to live in his time.

Our even greater good fortune is that through his publications—books and videos—he has left us a legacy equaled by hardly anyone in the history of magic, and certainly not at such a consistently high level.

The world of magic has lost one of its Grand Masters, and I have lost a friend and companion unlike any other. But what remains is not merely the memory of him. The very essence of his art remains, for anyone who practices magic intelligently today—or even speaks intelligently about it—cannot do so without Juan Tamariz being there, in his entire circumference.

In grateful remembrance,
Roberto Giobbi
August 18/19, 2026