This dissertation examines how the historical context has influenced the adaptations to cinema in Spanish of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s plays during the XX century, and how these new works contribute to the vitality of the adapted plays. The corpus of this work includes seven films: El alcalde de Zalamea (1914), La dama duende (1945), El alcalde de Zalamea (1954), El principe encadenado (1960), La leyenda del alcalde de Zalamea (1973), Extasis (1996) and Niño nadie (1997), adaptations of three of Calderon’s plays: La vida es sueño (1635), El alcalde de Zalamea (c.1636), and La dama duende (1629). The current research proposes three paths of history that relate to the reception in which these films were created. First, socio-political history, second, the history and specificity of the mediums involved: theatre and cinema, and third, the history of the theory of adaptation and its relationship with the history of art and of thought. We take the definition of the work of art as a sign subject to a changing interpretation through time, an interpretation shaped by a system of norms, functions, and values as social facts, as proposed by Jan Mukarovsky, and we document how these norms, functions, and values, conditioned different concretizations under different historical periods, what Felix Vodicka called context. This historical context is divided in three chronologically progressive periods that relate to the history of Spain: a first period from the arrival of the kinetoscope to Spain to the end of the first Francoist period in 1959, a second period from 1960 to the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, and a third period within the democratic era in Spain from 1975-1997. By approaching the study of these films with the structure proposed by Linda Hutcheon, via the questions, “what”, “who”, “when”, “where”, “why”, and “how” we adapt, we focus this study on adaptation, as described by Hutcheon: a process and a product, an act of reinterpretation and recreation. We emphasize the interconnectedness of the new work, not only with the original work, but as an art form in close relationship to the receptions of Calderon, of cinema and of adaptations in general, and we study which of these paths is more dominant in each historical period. Finally, we establish that the presence of these films, in a new and popular medium, cinema, creates novel and original concretizations of the adapted works and contributes to the vitality of Calderon’s plays in history.