One Century · Eleven Schools

Chronology

The whole archive on a single axis. Where each instrument was built, and when. The shape of the collection is the argument it makes.

What changed across the century

The instrument that starts the axis

The earliest guitar here was built in Madrid in 1909. It is smaller and lighter than anything built after the war, and it was made for gut strings, which are quieter and slacker than what would replace them. A guitar of that period was built for a room, not a hall. Everything that happens later on this axis is a response to the demand that it be heard by more people at once.

Nylon, and what it forced

Gut strings were the only option until the middle of the twentieth century. They were expensive, they broke, and they went out of tune as humidity moved. Nylon arrived after the Second World War and changed the material conditions of guitar making: strings became consistent, more durable, and capable of higher tension.

Higher tension meant makers could build for more volume without the string letting them down. Scale lengths crept longer. Tops were braced to take more load. A guitar built in 1955 is doing something a guitar built in 1925 could not have been asked to do.

Why the middle of the century is crowded

Several instruments here cluster in the decades after the war, and that is not an accident of collecting. It is when the Madrid workshops that had trained a generation of makers were producing their mature work, and when flamenco itself was moving from private gatherings toward theatres and recordings. The demands on the instrument changed, and the instruments changed with them.

What the recent end of the axis shows

The most recent instruments are built for amplification and for recording. That sounds like a diminishment and it is not. A guitar that will be close-miked can be built with detail that a guitar shouting across a room could never afford. Modern flamenco guitars are more even across the strings, more precise in intonation, and more consistent in construction than their ancestors, because the tools and the timber grading are better.

What they cannot have is age. The tops of the older instruments have spent a century vibrating, and that does something to wood that cannot be manufactured.

How to read the gaps

Some schools appear once on this axis. Others appear four or five times across decades. A school held once is a point. A school held across generations is a line, and only a line can show you a house style changing, or holding, over time.

The gaps are as informative as the clusters. They mark where the archive can demonstrate continuity and where it can only demonstrate that a workshop existed.

Showing

Select an instrument to read it · scroll sideways to travel the century

Selected instrument

Eleven regional schools, 1909 to 2024, plus one instrument that predates the guitar entirely.

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Madrid

Valencia

Granada

Algodonales

Almería

Baza

Córdoba

Jaén

Jerez

Málaga

Sevilla

Origin

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Periods are broad and describe what was happening to the making. The figure at the end of each is how many instruments the archive holds from that span.

Blanca Negra Crossover Origin instrument

The six periods, and why they are drawn there

These divisions are the archive's own. They are drawn at round decades for legibility, not because making changes on a twenty year cycle, and each boundary is a convenience rather than an event. What follows is the reasoning behind each, and what the collection holds from it.

The Standard 1900 – 1920

Antonio de Torres died in 1892, and by 1900 the proportions he had arrived at were simply what a Spanish guitar was. That is the distinction these years hold: not that the template existed, but that it had stopped being a proposal and become the default a maker started from without thinking about it. Within a further generation it was the international default too.

The archive holds two, and only one is a guitar. La Primera is an oud, the origin instrument that precedes the collection and the tradition it belongs to. El Ancestro is the earliest Spanish instrument here.

Madrid 1920 – 1940

The Madrid workshops are the densest concentration of consequential making in the century. The period closes at the Civil War, which interrupted supply, training and continuity across Spain, and the boundary is therefore one of the few in this band that marks a real event.

The archive holds two, both from 1925: La Sanada and La Sombra.

Scarcity 1940 – 1960

Postwar making under material constraint. What a workshop could obtain shaped what it built, and instruments from these years often show substitution and economy that a later maker would not have chosen. The archive reads that as evidence of conditions rather than as a defect.

The heaviest early period in the collection, with five: La Llorona, El Abuelo, El Fragua, El Varea and El Silencio.

Abroad 1960 – 1980

Flamenco's reach extended well beyond Spain in these decades, through touring, recording and players who settled elsewhere. Demand for Spanish instruments followed, and waiting lists at the best workshops lengthened accordingly.

The thinnest period in the collection, with two: El Callado and El Toque. That thinness is a fact about the archive rather than about the era.

Successors 1980 – 2000

The generation in which a great many Spanish workshops passed from the maker who built the reputation to a son, a brother or a declared disciple. It is the period the archive is most interested in, because succession is where a tradition either survives or does not.

Six: El Almería, El Hijo, El Montañero, El Hermano, El Nieto and La Guardia.

Restriction 2000 – present

Two pressures at once. Tropical hardwoods used for centuries came under international trade control, so instruments built before those controls cannot be built the same way again. And workshops that had run for generations closed, in some cases permanently, taking their particular way of working with them.

The largest group, with eight: El Caminero, La Macarena, La Señora, El Maestro, La Voz, La Zambra, La Frontera and La Serena.

Where these periods rest on published work rather than on the archive's own records, the sources are Romanillos and Winspear, The Vihuela de Mano and the Spanish Guitar (Sanguino Press, 2002); Romanillos, Antonio de Torres: Guitar Maker, His Life and Work (1987, revised 1997); and Courtnall, Making Master Guitars (1993). The instrument counts are drawn from the collection itself and are exact.