Although there had been numerous attempts since the beginning of cinema to offer wider panoramas than the standard Academy screen frame, it was not until 1953 that Twentieth Century-Fox's CinemaScope revolutionized film production and exhibition. After the Spanish premiere of The Robe (1953) at the Palacio de la Música in Madrid, on May 7, 1954, inventors Ángel Pérez Palacios and Aurelio Lerroux decided to redirect their efforts from entertainment devices and optical toys to the production of anamorphic lenses. This anamorphic system was based on the development of cylindrical lenses that enabled the horizontal compression of the image onto a standard 35mm negative. When projected, another lens with an identical curve made it possible to uncompress the frame and obtain spectacular images.

Throughout 1955 and 1956, Ángel Pérez Palacios and Aurelio Lerroux registered a number of patents related to this field. The first one was a “new system of anamorphic lenses for photography and cinematography”, which specialized in capturing “large size images” through horizontal compression. 

At the end of 1956, they filed a patent for a new anamorphic optical system that not only captured images, but also projected them with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

At the time, to test their invention in the field, they reached an agreement with the newsreel company No-Do to make two short films of about 12 minutes each: Reales sitios (1956) and Historia y cultura (1956). Both were made in AnscoColor, the American equivalent of the German Agfacolor, and assumed the role of tourist postcards.

For the first time, Spain participated in a World’s Fair – the 1958 Brussels World's Fair/Expo 58 (Salon International des Inventeurs, Bruxelles) – the first major World’s Fair following World War II. One of the gold medals went to Pérez Palacios and Lerroux's system, Hispanoscope. The press picked up the story – this being a time when the Franco regime was keen to seek international recognition in all areas of national output. 

The Rotafilm-Hispanoscope company provided three anamorphic lenses of 50, 75 and 100 mm, suitable for any standard 35mm camera body, to interested production companies. In contrast to the costly foreign royalties, the domestic fee was 150,000 pesetas per film, with an occasional stipend of 35,000 pesetas extra for the lens operator, who oversaw the set-up of the lenses and ensured correct alignment.

Over the following two years, another five feature films were shot under the Hispanoscope brand, all Catalan productions in which the landscape – mountainous, coastal or urban – played a fundamental role. Cumbres luminosas – Montserrat (1957) took best advantage of the panoramic format, in both the exterior scenes and the documentary sequences shot in the Santa Maria de Montserrat abbey in Catalonia, Spain. The depth of field and the diagonal compositions were less common than the typical foreground layout found in other films from the same period.

The cycle ended with the cinematographic recording of a theatrical show La Copla Andaluza (1959), which announced itself as “Experimental Cinema-Theater”. Paradoxically, the last Hispanoscope production was shot flat with spherical lenses and released in both flat and anamorphic copies, depending on the exhibitor's choice. When the anamorphic image-capture method was discarded due to strong commercial competition from French and Italian anamorphic systems (with trade names such as Totalscope, Dyaliscope, Franscope and Supercinescope), Hispanoscope was kept as a laboratory-only optical technique. In addition, Rotafilm re-printed and re-released six Spanish films shot in Academy format between 1943 and 1956 as anamorphic copies, including El escándalo (1943), Mariona Rebull (1947), and El capitán Veneno (1950).