Cebu’s politico-military governor, Gen. Inocencio Junquera was responsible for putting up Cebu’s first theater. After watching a Spanish play staged in a small Parian convent, he decided to put up the structure on the site of the destroyed Parian church.

However, because of Junquera’s liberal and anti-friar background, the friars, with Fray Martin Garcia Algocer, made it difficult for him to push the project. They spread rumors of more taxes on the project and even built a monument on the theater’s planned site.

Junguera, however, pursued the project in another location and constructed the theater’s first post on a land owned by Rafael Veloso in Barrio Kanipaan (now in downtown Cebu). Opening a street that ledg to the theater and with the help of the district’s residents, the theater was finished in 1895 and was named Teatro Junquera.

Junquera later left the Philippines in December of that year, leaving the theater to his nephew, Joaquin Hernandez Junquera, and Florentino Rallos. The ownership of Teatro Junquera was later passed on to several owners, like Pedro Royo, Leopold Falek, Pedro Rivera Mir and Jose Avila