Anne Igartiburu lost TVE’s New Year’s Eve and kept its oldest gossip show alive

Anne Igartiburu

Photo: Ruben Ortega / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 18, 1969 Elorrio, Biscay, Spain
Occupation	Television presenter and actress
Awards	2 Antena de Oro

For seventeen consecutive New Year’s Eves, the last voice millions of Spaniards heard before the twelve grapes belonged to Anne Igartiburu, standing above the Puerta del Sol for Televisión Española. Then the public broadcaster gave the chimes to someone else. She did not retire from the ritual. She carried it to a Twitch stream run by Ibai Llanos, and later to a private party at the house of Los Javis, while keeping her seat at the desk of D Corazón, the weekend celebrity magazine she has fronted on TVE for almost three decades.

That double life is the most revealing thing about her. Igartiburu is the closest thing Spanish public television has to a house presenter, the woman sent out for anniversaries, galas and the countdown itself. Yet the programme that defines her had to be rebuilt almost from scratch to survive, and it recovered only after it was allowed to change around her. Whether she was the reason, or the constant that allowed everything around her to change, is the argument her career keeps making.

She grew up in Elorrio, a town in Biscay about forty kilometres from Bilbao, and was born there on 18 February 1969. In an Instagram post in March she described a country childhood of rain, mud and plain bread sandwiches, of afternoons with her grandparents and a pencil case with two floors of colours. Her father, José Manuel, was a builder. Her mother, Lourdes, was a schoolteacher who volunteered as a dog handler with the mountain rescue unit of the Ertzaintza, the Basque police. In June 1987 the helicopter carrying her team crashed near Lake Enol, in Asturias, during the search for a missing 13-year-old boy. Igartiburu, who had been competing as an athlete, gave up the sport. Years later she told Bertín Osborne that what remains is the satisfaction of knowing her mother was doing something important for others, “but it was hard to lift our heads again.”

She studied industrial marketing and walked into television through the smallest door available: Arrasate Telebista, the local channel in Mondragón, in 1993. Euskal Telebista followed, then a season on Telecinco co-hosting a couples show with Antonio Hidalgo in 1994 and 1995. Acting ran in parallel for a while. She played Amaia in Suerte in 1997, a nun in Antón Reixa’s El lápiz del carpintero in 2003, and Ainhoa in the Basque-language comedy Zorion perfektua in 2009, but the screen career never displaced the studio one.

TVE hired her in 1997 for its daily celebrity programme, and over the next decade turned her into a utility player for the big nights. She read out Spain’s Eurovision votes in 2002, 2003 and 2004 and later hosted several of the national selection shows. From 2005 to 2009 she presented ¡Mira quién baila!, the Spanish version of Dancing with the Stars, and in 2006 she co-hosted the gala for TVE’s fiftieth anniversary with Laura Valenzuela and Paula Vázquez. At the end of 2005 she climbed to the Puerta del Sol for the first time. In that decade her celebrity show flirted with a quarter of the audience.

The decline was just as plain. Schedule changes eroded the programme, and in 2012 TVE moved her to +Gente, an afternoon magazine cancelled the following year, before sending her back. In 2022 the chimes went to Ana Obregón and Los Morancos, a decision the Spanish press described as her removal after 17 uninterrupted years. By August 2024 D Corazón averaged 5.8 per cent of the audience, possibly its worst month ever. There is also an awkwardness the genre never resolves. A presenter famous for discretion about her own life has spent her career narrating other people’s, and the same press still files her under her brief marriage to the ballet dancer Igor Yebra, which lasted from 2004 to 2006. When Yebra published a memoir this year disclosing his multiple sclerosis, several outlets led with the marriage rather than the illness.

What turned the programme around was change, not continuity. A 2024 overhaul paired her with Jordi González, who left in January 2025 for health reasons. On 28 June 2025 the contributor Javi de Hoyos was promoted to co-host and the show stretched to nearly two hours each Saturday and Sunday. Against Telecinco’s rival Vaya fama, launched that September, D Corazón averaged 9.8 per cent to its competitor’s 6.8 by late November. In July 2026 it reached 11.6 per cent. On 4 October it opened a new set enlarged with augmented reality, brought back the columnist Laura Fa and kept widening its brief to general news, leading one edition with the floods on the Mediterranean coast.

Away from La 1, she has treated competition formats as a way to stay visible on her own terms. She finished fourth as Monstruita in Mask Singer in 2021, competed in Tu cara me suena on Antena 3 in 2023 and hosted the dance contest Baila como puedas for TVE in 2024. Basque television keeps calling her back: Duelo en las alturas in 2022, and an announced revival of Tal para cual, the couples quiz Ramón García first presented in 1991. She has hosted the Hitz Sariak, the Grupo Noticias awards, since their first edition, and on 26 October 2026 she led the third gala in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Her book La vida empieza cada día appeared with Aguilar in 2022, and she runs the podcast Mi latido de más alongside a YouTube channel of conversations on meditation. The Antena de Oro, Spain’s broadcasting industry prize, has gone to her twice, in 2012 and in 2024.

Her private life has been public mostly by accident. She married the conductor Pablo Heras-Casado in Elorrio in 2015, and their separation was reported in February 2021. She has three children: Noa and Carmen, adopted from India and Vietnam, and Nicolás, born in 2016. Her father died in October 2024, at 79.

The countdown on 31 December is no longer hers to give, and TVE has shown it can live without her on that night. The weekend lunchtime is another matter. Every Saturday and Sunday on La 1, the presenter the network once moved aside is still the reason its oldest gossip show has an audience to argue over.

Tags: actors, TV presenters, Anne Igartiburu, D Corazón, Ibai Llanos, Javi de Hoyos

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