Laura Escanes

Social media algorithms often devour their own children before they learn to articulate a message in front of a studio mic.

Laura Escanes has had to live with that stigma since 2015, when her private life hit the newsstands and her online profile was flooded with millions of eyes that had nothing to do with her professional merits. Rather than retreating into the simple commercial promotion of fashion brands, she began building a serious profile as a communicator.

In 2018, she published the book Piel de letra with publisher Aguilar. That volume of poetic prose sold tens of thousands of copies, but above all it confirmed that there was an audience willing to follow her beyond the touchscreen.

No one in the industry gave her a chance in front of a professional camera.

Moving to TV and facing the live test

Making the leap to conventional audiovisual work meant breaking out of the internet celebrity mold. In 2022, she signed with the platform Podimo to host Entre el cielo y las nubes, a conversational podcast where she took editorial control of the interviews and recording pace for the first time.

But the real physical test came in 2023 with her participation in the game show The Edge on Antena 3. There she faced apnea and technical coordination challenges in prime time and earned a third-place finish that won over much of the most skeptical TV critics.

Live TV is unforgiving.

So Catalonia's public broadcaster saw in her the perfect profile to refresh its younger audience. In October 2023, the 3Cat platform premiered La travessa, an outdoor adventure format produced by Aguacate & Calabaza Films, where Escanes made her debut as a solo host, speaking entirely in Catalan. The show surpassed 1.5 million digital views during its first season in the on-demand catalog.

Confirmation in the director's chair

On the night of December 31, 2023, she co-hosted the New Year's Eve broadcast on TV3 alongside singer Miki Núñez. The show reached a 36.2% audience share and drew nearly one million viewers in front of their TVs, outperforming most general-interest channels in Catalonia.

And the formula was repeated.

In 2024, the Catalan broadcaster renewed La travessa for a second season, moving the filming from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean coast. That same year, she also recorded her appearance on the cooking competition Cuina com puguis, directed by Marc Ribas.

For the second run of La travessa in 2024, the technical setup involved 45 crew members and 16 cameras operating simultaneously over 21 consecutive days of filming.