Long before he was known as one of the finest classical guitar makers of the twentieth century, José Luis Romanillos was known simply as a boy who was good with wood. Born in Madrid in 1932 to a family with roots in the Guadalajara towns of Madrigal and Tordelrábano, he began an apprenticeship at just thirteen years old with the Madrid cabinet-making firm Muebles Caballero, learning to work fine timber years before he ever touched a guitar.

A Detour Through England

In 1956, at the age of twenty-four, Romanillos left Spain for England — not to build instruments, but simply to learn the language. His first jobs there had nothing to do with woodworking at all: he worked as a psychiatric nurse at a hospital in Epsom, then later at a hospital in London, before eventually returning to cabinet-making. In 1959, he married Marian Harris Winspear, an Englishwoman who would go on to become not just his wife but his closest collaborator, co-authoring his major scholarly works and helping catalog decades of research into Spanish instrument-making.

The guitar entered Romanillos's life almost as a hobby. In 1961, working from a book called Make Your Own Spanish Guitar by A. P. Sharpe, he built his first instrument at his home on Falkland Road in London — a flamenco guitar he named "Toribia," after his mother. For several years afterward, he built guitars only on the side, alongside his regular work, with no plan yet to make it his profession.

An Unlikely Patron: Julian Bream

That changed in 1970, when the celebrated British guitarist Julian Bream encouraged Romanillos to commit to guitar making full-time, offering him a workshop of his own at East End Farm in Semley, Wiltshire. Romanillos took the leap, and by 1978 had established a permanent workshop of his own nearby, named "Madrigal" after the Guadalajara town his family had come from — a place where he would also begin teaching the craft to his youngest son, Liam.

Called "the Stradivari of the guitar" by the Daily Mail, and hailed by the Italian magazine Sei Corde as the most important living stringed-instrument maker of his time.On the reputation Romanillos built in Wiltshire

The partnership with Bream proved transformative for both men. In 1973, Bream purchased a Romanillos guitar and used it for years afterward in concerts and recordings, at the height of his own international fame — an association that did as much as anything to carry the Romanillos name across the classical guitar world. Bream would later write the foreword to Romanillos's landmark book on Antonio de Torres, a fitting bookend to a friendship built entirely on the strength of a single instrument.

Chasing the "Spanish Sound"

What set Romanillos apart from many of his contemporaries wasn't experimentation for its own sake, but an almost devotional fidelity to a specific ideal: the tone produced by the great nineteenth-century Sevillian maker Antonio de Torres, and by Santos Hernández after him. Romanillos considered these two makers' instruments the truest expression of what guitarists and historians call the "Spanish sound" — warm, singing, and perfectly balanced across the registers — and he spent the better part of his working life pursuing that same balance in his own guitars.

He believed, and often said, that a guitar built in this tradition carried something beyond mere technique: that it represented an inner part of its maker, as much as the social and cultural inheritance of its homeland. It's a strikingly personal way to talk about instrument-making, and it runs through everything he built and wrote.

The Scholar Behind the Craftsman

Where Romanillos truly set himself apart, though, was in the sheer depth of his historical research. Working closely with Marian, he spent years tracking down and documenting surviving guitars built by Antonio de Torres, examining their construction in painstaking detail and building, for the first time, a rigorous account of exactly how Torres had shaped the modern classical guitar — its fan bracing, its scale length, its body proportions. The result, published in 1983 as Antonio de Torres: Guitar Maker — His Life and Work, remains the definitive study of Torres to this day, and has been translated into six languages, including Japanese and Chinese.

Romanillos and his wife followed that achievement in 2002 with an equally ambitious project: a dictionary of Spanish stringed-instrument makers titled The Vihuela de Mano and the Spanish Guitar, cataloging generations of luthiers whose work might otherwise have gone undocumented. Along the way, Romanillos lectured widely on the organology, history, and development of the vihuela and the Spanish guitar, and served for a decade as a member of the Crafts Council of Great Britain.

Teacher to a Generation of Luthiers

In 1995, Romanillos and Marian returned to Spain, settling in Guijosa, a rural district of Sigüenza in the province of Guadalajara. The guitars he built there became known among collectors as belonging to his "Guijosa period" — instruments built by a maker now working at the height of both his craft and his scholarship.

It was also in these later years that Romanillos's role as a teacher came fully into its own. He and Marian founded a celebrated guitar-making course in Spain, and he taught seminars and workshops on Spanish guitar construction across numerous countries over the following decades. Many of his students went on to become respected luthiers in their own right — a teaching legacy that, by the account of those who studied under him, may have reached hundreds of makers worldwide, carrying his understanding of the "Spanish sound" forward long after any single workshop could have managed alone.

Recognition and Final Years

In 2014, the University of Alicante awarded Romanillos an honorary doctorate — a Doctor Honoris Causa — in recognition of his contributions to research and to the dissemination of knowledge about the Spanish guitar. Those who knew him well also described a side of his character that had little to do with guitars at all: a lifelong love of poetry, largely unknown outside his close circle of friends and family.

José Luis Romanillos died in Sigüenza on 11 February 2022, at the age of 89. The town lowered its flags to half-mast in his honor, and guitar associations across Spain and beyond organized tribute concerts in the months that followed, including one timed to coincide with what would have been his ninetieth birthday. His wife Marian, his lifelong research partner, attended several of these tributes in person.

He wanted to be more than a successful guitar maker — he wanted to be, and became, the well-respected academic he had always hoped to be.From a tribute by a fellow luthier