Conde Hermanos

If you have heard a flamenco guitar on a concert stage, you have almost certainly heard a Conde. Paco de Lucía played them for the whole of his performing life. Sabicas, Niño Ricardo, Melchor de Marchena and Mario Escudero played them. So, for forty years, did Leonard Cohen. The family that built them has been working in central Madrid since 1915, and it is one of the few guitar dynasties anywhere to have reached a fourth generation with its reputation intact.

It is also the source of more confusion than any other name in Spanish lutherie. There are three Conde workshops in Madrid today, none of them a copy or an imitator, all of them descended from the same bench. Sorting out which is which is most of the reason this page exists.

The Man Before the Name

The dynasty does not begin with anyone called Conde. It begins with Domingo Esteso (1882–1937).

Esteso trained as an apprentice under Manuel Ramírez, the finest Madrid builder of his generation and the man whose workshop also produced Santos Hernández and Modesto Borreguero. It was a formidable school. Ramírez’s shop was where the Torres design was absorbed, argued with, and turned into something recognisably Madrileño, and the three men who came out of it went on to define Spanish guitar making for the next half century.

After Ramírez died, Esteso continued working for his widow — but under his own name on the label, which tells you how much his work was already worth.

Gravina 7

In 1915 Esteso opened his own shop at Calle Gravina number 7, a few streets north of the Gran Vía. He ran it with his wife, Nicolasa Salamanca, who finished the guitars — a working partnership rather than a courtesy, and a detail usually left out of the story.

That address matters. Gravina 7 is where every important Conde guitar was made for the next seventy-five years, and it is the address Leonard Cohen named from a podium in Oviedo in 2011.

Esteso built flamenco guitars almost exclusively, and built them the way the instrument wants to be built: very light, very responsive, loud for their size, with the attack and the bite the music needs. Spain’s economy in the 1920s being what it was, a great many of them went abroad — a substantial export trade to Argentina carried labels reading made for Romero y Hernández of Buenos Aires, which is why fine Esteso-era instruments still turn up in South America.

The Nephews

Esteso and Nicolasa had no children. Instead, the workshop filled with her nephews: Faustino Conde arrived in 1926, Mariano Conde in 1929, and Julio Conde, the youngest, after the war. They learned the trade at Esteso’s bench.

Esteso died in 1937, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, of a respiratory infection — the kind of illness penicillin would shortly make survivable, had there been any to be had in Madrid that year. The brothers kept building through to 1939, in tiny numbers, because there was a war on.

The Widow’s Label

What happened next says a good deal about the family.

The brothers had inherited the workshop and could have put their own name on it immediately. They did not. From the end of the war until 1960 every guitar left Gravina 7 labelled Viuda y Sobrinos de Esteso — “Widow and Nephews of Esteso” — out of respect for their aunt Nicolasa. They only changed it after she died in December 1959.

Twenty years of a maker’s best work signed under someone else’s name is not a commercial decision. It is worth knowing when you handle a guitar from that period: the label says Esteso, but the hands were Conde.

The business grew regardless. In the early 1950s they opened a sales and customer shop at Atocha 53, run by Julio. In 1957 a second workshop at Pozuelo de Alarcón took on student models, built unsigned and known in the trade as guitarras de segunda.

The Media Luna

Somewhere before 1953 the brothers drew a new headstock for their best guitars: the media luna, the half-moon — a crescent-topped head unlike anything else coming out of Madrid.

In 1960 it became standard on the top of the range, and it has been the house signature ever since. It is the single quickest way to identify a Conde across a room, and it carries real information: on a Conde, the half-moon means the instrument is from the upper line, not the shop’s student work.

Hermanos Conde, 1960–1988

With Nicolasa gone, the label finally changed — to Sobrinos de Domingo Esteso and Hermanos Conde, used in alternation and sometimes together. These three decades were the most productive in the family’s history, and the period that made the name internationally.

It was also when the brothers began to genuinely separate their classical and flamenco construction rather than treating the flamenco guitar as a lighter version of the same thing.

The Negra

And then they did something close to heresy.

A flamenco guitar had always meant cypress back and sides — pale, light, cheap, dry and percussive, with the fast decay the dance and the cante require. Rosewood was for classical guitars: heavier, denser, with more sustain and more bloom in the bass. The two traditions did not mix.

The Condes built a flamenco guitar with rosewood back and sides. The result — the flamenca negra, the “black” flamenco guitar — kept the flamenco architecture, the low action and the snap, but gained volume and depth.

The timing was exact. Flamenco was moving out of the tablao and onto the concert stage, where a cypress guitar built for a room of forty people simply disappears. The negra is the instrument that made a solo flamenco recital in a two-thousand-seat hall possible, and it is reasonable to call it the first flamenco guitar designed for concert use.

Paco de Lucía made it the standard. Every serious flamenco maker builds one now.

Paco

Paco de Lucía came to the Condes around the turn of the 1970s, having played a Ramírez until then. He stayed for the rest of his life, and he played Faustino’s guitars almost exclusively.

Three instruments are worth knowing:

• A 1968 negra by Faustino — his first, and long since stolen
• A 1975 Faustino negra: German spruce top, pau ferro back and sides, an unusually long 670 mm scale. This is the guitar. He played it for decades, through repair after repair — the rosette recoated, the label eventually replaced — and he was still playing it when he died in 2014
• A 1980 Faustino negra: German spruce, Indian rosewood, 652 mm, used on tour with José María Bandera and Juan Manuel Cañizares, and given to his brother Antonio in 1992

That 670 mm scale is worth a pause. It is long — far longer than the 650 mm classical standard — and it buys tension, projection and attack at the cost of making everything physically harder to play. It is the specification of a guitar built for a player with extraordinary hands who needed to be heard over a band.

Cohen’s Conde

In the 1960s a young Canadian songwriter living on Hydra walked into Gravina 7 and bought a guitar that was already forty years old.

He kept it for the rest of his life, wrote on it, toured with it, and in 2011, accepting the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in Oviedo, chose to talk about it in front of the Spanish establishment:

I have a Conde guitar, which was made in Spain in the great workshop at number 7 Gravina Street.

Leonard Cohen spent that speech explaining that his entire body of work rested on six chords taught to him by a Spanish flamenco guitarist in Montreal. The guitar was the proof he brought with him.

The Family Divides

The third generation arrived in 1971, when Felipe Conde Cavia (born 1957) joined his father Mariano and his uncle Faustino at Gravina. His brother Mariano Conde (born 1959) followed.

From there the family began, slowly and without acrimony, to come apart into separate workshops:

• 1980 — Mariano Conde Sr. opened a second shop at Felipe V 2, beside the Teatro Real, working alongside Gravina
• 1988 — Faustino died; Felipe V 2 became independent
• 1989 — Mariano Sr. died; his sons took over
• 1995 — Julio died; his daughter Carmen took on Atocha 53
• 2010 — the brothers separated. Felipe moved to Arrieta 4; Mariano opened at Amnístia 1

Gravina 7 is closed. In 2015 every surviving branch released a centenary guitar for the hundred years since Esteso opened it — which is as close to a family reunion as the story gets.

Three Workshops, One Name

Here is the practical part. All three are real, all three are family, and the differences are of hand rather than legitimacy. Every address is within a short walk of the Teatro Real.

• Felipe Conde — Arrieta 4. Felipe Conde Cavia works with his son Felipe and his daughter María. The best-known of the three outside Spain, and the branch most associated with the Felipe V model and with commissions for players outside flamenco
• Mariano Conde — Amnístia 1. Felipe’s brother, beside the Ópera metro station, continuing the line he inherited at Felipe V 2
• Conde Hermanos — Atocha 53. Julio’s descendants, at the shop Julio opened in the early 1950s, still trading under the Hermanos Conde label

A note for anyone buying: on a vintage instrument the label alone will not tell you who built it. Viuda y Sobrinos de Esteso covers everything up to 1960 and almost none of it was made by Esteso. Sobrinos de Domingo Esteso and Hermanos Conde overlap and were used interchangeably. The guitars most prized today are the ones from Gravina built by Faustino in the 1960s and 1970s, and identifying those means knowing the labels, the headstock and the hand — not just reading the paper inside the soundhole.

The Fourth Generation

At Arrieta 4, the name now signs instruments of its own: Felipe Conde Crespo, son of Felipe Conde Cavia and great-grandson of Mariano, working alongside his father and his sister María.

Spanish naming makes the two Felipes easy to tell apart once you know the convention — the second surname is the mother’s, so Cavia is the father and Crespo the son. On a label, that one word is the difference between a third-generation guitar and a fourth.

What is interesting about him is that he has gone in two directions at once. He builds modern concert classicals, including lattice-braced instruments — the contemporary high-output architecture, about as far from a 1930s Madrid flamenco guitar as a nylon-string gets. And he builds meticulous historical copies.

The clearest example is his version of a 1931 Domingo Esteso, taken from the original in the family’s own collection — an instrument he grew up studying and playing. The copy follows the 1931 plantilla and bracing exactly, in German spruce over Madagascar rosewood, 650 mm scale, 52 mm nut, finished in shellac to look its age, with Fustero tuners copied from the originals. The purfling and inlays are his own design.

A family that spent two decades signing its guitars with the founder’s name has produced a descendant who can take the founder’s actual 1931 guitar off the wall and build it again from the inside out. That is an unusual kind of continuity, and it is not sentimental — it requires knowing precisely why every brace sits where it does.

The Essentials

1. Founded by Domingo Esteso (1882–1937), an apprentice of Manuel Ramírez, at Calle Gravina 7, Madrid, in 1915
2. Esteso ran the shop with his wife Nicolasa Salamanca, who finished the guitars; much early output was exported to Buenos Aires
3. Her nephews Faustino (1926), Mariano (1929) and later Julio Conde trained at the bench and inherited the workshop
4. From 1940 to 1960 they signed every guitar Viuda y Sobrinos de Esteso out of respect for their aunt, who died in December 1959
5. The media luna half-moon headstock, drawn before 1953, became the mark of the top line in 1960
6. They built the first rosewood-bodied flamenco guitar — the negra — giving flamenco an instrument that could fill a concert hall
7. Paco de Lucía played Faustino’s negras for his entire career, chiefly a 1975 instrument with a 670 mm scale that he kept until his death in 2014
8. Leonard Cohen bought a Conde at Gravina 7 in the 1960s and named the address in his 2011 Prince of Asturias speech
9. The family separated into independent workshops between 1980 and 2010; Gravina 7 is now closed
10. Three branches work in Madrid today: Felipe Conde at Arrieta 4, Mariano Conde at Amnístia 1, and Conde Hermanos at Atocha 53
11. The fourth generation, Felipe Conde Crespo, builds both lattice-braced concert classicals and exact copies of the family’s own 1931 Domingo Esteso

What the Condes understood, and what the negra proves, is that a tradition stays alive by being argued with. Cypress was not wrong; it was simply answering a question nobody was asking any more once flamenco left the small rooms. The family that spent twenty years refusing to put its own name on its own guitars turned out to be perfectly willing to break the oldest rule in the craft when the music required it. Both decisions came from the same place.

A history of Conde Hermanos and the Esteso–Conde workshops of Madrid