Spain: birth-place of Andrés Segovia, Paco de Lucia, Antonio de Torres, Santos Hernández, Francisco Tárrega, Fernando Sor, y el flamenco. If any country should have a national museum of the guitar, Spain is it. True, there are a number of private collections but the only decent public collection of guitars is in the Museu de la Musica de Barcelona along with musical instruments and documents of all descriptions. The Antonio de Torres museum in Almeria doesn’t have many instruments of its own and so depends on loans from private collectors. I don’t think they have a single Torres. La Casa de la Guitarra en Sevilla is a private “museum” which has flamenco shows and a shop which buys and sells guitars. Ronda Guitar House has a collection of many different kinds of instruments and offers courses and concerts. The Romanillos collection is at: Centro de la Vihuela de Mano y La Guitarra Española “José Luis Romanillos” in Sigüenza. Under the present government the Museum is open every day; in the morning 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. & in the afternoon from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
It is beginning to look as though no one in government is going to put up the money to fund a full-fledged guitar museum in this country so we have to look at other alternatives. The MIMMA (Museo Interactivo de la Música) in Málaga is a model we might look to for a guitar museum. The MIMMA is an interactive museum of music, musical instruments and experiments so it is much more hands-on and child-friendly but the model of how it came about is useful.
The collection is private but the beautiful, recently refurbished building has been provided by the town council of Málaga. In one newspaper article the projected cost of the purchase and renovation of the building was 3 million Euros. Couldn’t Madrid or Granada as centres of guitar-making, Córdoba as the location of the most important guitar festival in world or the central government create a museum? Marcelino López Nieto has famously said that he will donate his collection (one of the best in Spain) to a museum in Madrid on the condition that it stays in Madrid. What are you waiting for, Madrid? Another of the great collections in Spain was sold off piecemeal between 1990 and 2000 mostly to Japanese collectors. Is Spain’s cultural heritage only important to those outside Spain? A sad state of affairs indeed.
Japan has a guitar museum, El Palacio de la Guitarra, with a great collection of instruments, many of which belonged to the Granada guitarrist and teacher Manuel Cano. What about Spain?