The romantic story of the Spanish guitar is always the same one: a solitary master, a handful of instruments a year, a waiting list of concert players. It is a good story, and it leaves out almost everyone who actually plays the guitar. Manuel Raimundo built his career on the other half of the problem — how to put a genuinely Spanish instrument, made in Spain by Spanish hands using Spanish methods, into the hands of students, amateurs and working musicians. He started alone in a small family shop in 1968. The workshop now sends guitars to eighty-odd countries, and it has never stopped building them the traditional way.

Valencia

Raimundo's story begins in the province that has quietly supplied the world with Spanish guitars for more than a century. Granada and Madrid produced the celebrated individual names — the makers whose instruments sit in glass cases and concert halls. Valencia produced the guitars that people learned on, practised on, and took to weddings and tablaos and music schools.

That is not a lesser tradition, and Valencians have never regarded it as one. The climate suited seasoning timber, the timber trade was established, and the workshop skills passed down through families for generations. What emerged was the finest series production in the world — instruments made in quantity but not carelessly, by craftsmen who had learned the same methods the famous makers used.

1968: One Man and a Small Shop

In 1968 Manuel Raimundo decided to set up on his own. He had three things: his own experience at the bench, considerable enthusiasm, and a small shop premises that belonged to his family. That was the entire company.

He worked hard at it, and within a few months he had taken on a salesman — Salvador Cortina — to travel around Spain and tell people the guitars existed. It is an unglamorous detail and an important one. A great many fine makers have failed because nobody knew about them. Raimundo understood early that building the instrument was only half the job.

The partnership worked. Demand grew quickly enough that the two of them decided to try the international market, and the growth from that point was more or less continuous.

From Twenty Hands to a Workshop

By 1980, twelve years in, Manuel Raimundo had increased his workforce to more than twenty people, and between them they were producing around eight thousand instruments a year.

Today the workshop sits in Paterna, just outside the city of Valencia, employing a team of skilled artisans who build classical, flamenco and acoustic guitars at every grade from student models to top-of-the-range concert instruments. Annual output runs beyond twelve thousand guitars, and roughly eighty-five per cent of them are exported.

Those numbers invite an obvious objection, and it is worth confronting directly: is this still lutherie, or is it a factory? The answer lies in how the guitars are actually made.

The Spanish System

Every Raimundo guitar is built using the traditional Spanish system — the construction method Spanish luthiers have used for centuries, and the thing that most sharply distinguishes a Spanish guitar from one built in the Northern European or American tradition.

In this method the soundboard is joined to the neck first, and the instrument is then assembled around that union. Part of the neck remains permanently inside the body, forming what is known as the Spanish heel. The alternative — a dovetail joint, borrowed from the furniture trade and standard on most steel-string acoustics — attaches a finished neck to a finished body.

The difference is not academic. The Spanish heel produces a structurally firmer instrument, with the neck and body behaving as a single unit rather than two components meeting at a joint. It is more demanding to build and considerably harder to repair, which is precisely why volume manufacturers elsewhere abandoned it. Raimundo did not.

The workshop's own claim is a simple one: no two instruments have ever come out the same. Each guitar differs from the one before it, because artisans made it — and that, they argue, is the whole point.

Made in Spain, and Provable

Raimundo was the first Spanish guitar manufacturer to obtain the Certificate of Spanish Origin for its entire output — documentary proof that every guitar bearing the name is made completely in Spain.

This matters more than it may appear. The phrase "Spanish guitar" has been thoroughly diluted: a great many instruments sold under Spanish-sounding names are designed in Spain and built somewhere considerably cheaper, or assembled in Spain from components made abroad. A certificate covering the whole range removes the ambiguity, and Raimundo was willing to be the first house to submit to it.

The workshop has also received the Quality Award from IMPIVA, the Valencian institute for small and medium industry, recognising sustained effort in the pursuit of excellence.

The Range

Few workshops anywhere offer a catalogue this broad. Alongside classical and flamenco guitars — the core of the business — Raimundo builds cutaway models, acoustic guitars, and the traditional Spanish plucked instruments that most modern makers have quietly dropped: bandurrias, lutes and their relatives.

The flamenco instruments are built as flamenco instruments rather than classical guitars with a golpeador stuck on, which is a distinction worth insisting upon. A true flamenco guitar is lighter, with a thinner top and lighter bracing for a faster and more percussive response, cypress back and sides for the characteristic bright dry voice, and a lower action that will tolerate the buzz flamenco players accept as part of the sound.

The house has also gone somewhere most traditional Spanish workshops have refused to follow, developing MIDI and electro-classical instruments for players working with amplification and electronics. And it produces signature models in genuine collaboration with performers — the guitar built with Tatyana Ryzhkova uses solid black limba for the back, sides and headstock, with a headstock design the two of them worked out together.

There is a snobbery in the guitar world about workshops that build in quantity, and Raimundo is a useful corrective to it. The alternative to a well-made production instrument is not a handmade masterpiece — almost nobody can afford one of those. The alternative is a badly made instrument from somewhere with cheaper labour and no tradition behind it, sold under a Spanish-sounding name. What Manuel Raimundo built, starting from one man in a borrowed family shop, was the machinery to keep the real thing within reach: Spanish woods, Spanish methods, Spanish hands, and a certificate to prove it. For most guitarists in the world, that is a more consequential achievement than another concert instrument nobody will ever play.

A history of Manuel Raimundo and the Valencian workshop he founded in 1968