Every year, while cities like Vigo boast of their light shows and countries like Venezuela or Portugal compete to light up Christmas before anyone else, there is an Andalusian municipality that, discreetly, has been setting the real rhythm of that calendar for decades.
Although few know it, this is where Christmas really begins.
A light by chance. The story begins in Puente Genil, a town that, before becoming a world reference for festive lighting, already had an intimate and almost genetic relationship with electricity. At the end of the 19th century, its flour and electricity factory “La Alianza” lit some of the first electric streetlights in Andalusia.
From that early love affair with light, an apparently minor moment would later emerge that would end up changing everything: an electrician named Francisco Jiménez Carmona, owner of a small appliance store, decided to build a wooden star with light bulbs to decorate his window one post-war Christmas Day. What could have been just a nice gesture of local commerce sparked a collective fascination. The neighbors gathered, the City Council asked to illuminate entire streets, the nearby towns demanded the same, and without anyone being able to foresee it, a company had just been born that would end up illuminating half the planet.
The birth of a giant. Decades later, that initial spark transformed into Iluminaciones Ximénez, today Ximenez Group, a group capable of designing and manufacturing lighting installations for more than 600 cities in 40 countries, from Madrid or Vigo to Dubai, passing through New York, Moscow, Sydney or Malabo. An expansion that maintains, however, a deeply artisanal root: all the lights are manufactured in Puente Genil, where each Christmas season more than 180 workers produce millions of LED points day and night that will later travel to the five continents.
The company functions as a bright boutique that adapts each project to the culture of the destination, from the amber warmth of the Nordic countries to the explosive colors of Latin America, through the classic tones of the United States or the monochrome designs of some Spanish cities. To its catalog are added collaborations with renowned designers and projects as imposing as the largest Christmas tree in Europe or the tallest in Central America, or even giant tunnels in Moscow capable of transforming entire avenues into immersive scenarios.
Puente Genil as a secret laboratory. Although the lights travel so far, everything always begins at home. Puente Genil has become an open testing ground, a space where the most risky and innovative proposals are experimented with before traveling to Vigo, Brussels or New York. La Matallana and Paseo del Romeral function as a technological walkway where new structures, lighting patterns, immersive tunnels and shows synchronized through pixel mapping appear every year, capable of converting entire streets into changing audiovisual surfaces.
In 2025, the town will deploy nearly two million LED points, a forest of illumination that extends through villages, avenues, streetlights, squares and facades, accompanied by a cultural program of almost thirty events that turns the city into a first-rate Christmas epicenter.
And more. But the hyperbole goes beyond the visual spectacle: Puente Genil, located between Seville, Córdoba, Málaga and Granada, preserves a unique industrial heritage, from its old power plants to its modernist mansions, and a festive life that transcends even Christmas, with an Holy Week (the “Mananta”) so unique that it has rituals and processions impossible to find anywhere else.
Economic impact. The success of Ximenez Group does not only lie in the ability to dazzle visually. Their projects have become true economic engines for the cities that hire them: they attract tourism, increase sales, reactivate entire neighborhoods and generate local identity through decorations designed to dialogue with each culture.
In Sydney they designed an interactive labyrinth that changes color according to human movement, in Moscow they built an enchanted forest and a 200-meter tunnel, in Seville they synchronize Three Wise Men’s crowns with light and sound, in Vigo they deploy monumental digital trees, and in New York they provide engineering, design and pieces manufactured in Andalusia.
El quid The key, they say, is in the fusion between tradition and avant-garde: a family business founded in a small store in Córdoba that today produces shows with its own low-consumption technology, advanced LED systems and intelligent motors capable of rescheduling shows in a matter of hours, as if the streets were gigantic living screens.
Homemade star in global phenomenon. Despite managing more than 40 million euros annually and projecting 50% growth in the next decade, the company still has the soul of a workshop and memory of origin. Three generations have continued that first wooden star lit in Puente Genil, transforming it into an industrial model that combines craftsmanship, innovation and a deep understanding of what it means to illuminate as a business.
Perhaps for this reason, Puente Genil is not only a global supplier: it is, in its essence, the place where Christmas is rehearse every year, where ideas are born that will later shine in giant cities like New York or Dubai, and where technology and tradition come together to demonstrate that some of the most universal stories begin, almost always, with a gesture as simple as turning on a light bulb… in a remote municipality in Andalusia.
Image | Ximenez, Vigo Tourism
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