El Puerto de Santa María went without a theatre for more than twenty years after fire destroyed the Teatro Principal in 1984. The replacement opened on 27 October 2007 on the Plaza del Polvorista, over an eighteenth-century cavalry barracks, with 600 seats. Its name settled a local argument: on Rafael Alberti's death in 1999 every party on the council had agreed to name the new house after the poet, and in the end it went instead to Pedro Muñoz Seca, the comic playwright also born in the town.