If there is one city in the world which deserves a great guitar festival, a guitar museum, a prestigious competition for guitarists and another competition for guitar-makers it is Granada. Granada and the guitar go back centuries and even today there are over 30 guitar-makers in the city and 20 more in the other towns in the province of Granada. The conservatory has one of the oldest guitar programs in Andalucia and of course some very illustrious guitarists came from or have come to live in Granada. Manuel Cano Tamayo, Andrés Segovia, Ángel Barrios, Pepe Cuéllar, Vicente el Granaíno, Francisco Rodríguez Murciano, David Martínez, Marcus Toscano, Alfredo Mesa, Alberto López, Álvaro Martinete, José Fermín Fernández, Pepe Romero, Vicente Coves, Elliot Fisk, the Habichuela family greats, Miguel Ochando, Luis Mariano, and many more.

Well, in 2017 Granada got its guitar festival and a guitar-making competition thanks to Vicente Coves and the 5th edition of the festival has just been announced. One of the most prestigious guitar-playing competitions in the world is named after Andrés Segovia and takes place in a town on the Granada coast so all we need now is a museum which can preserve the unbroken line of instrument-makers from the 12th century.

So today let’s celebrate the festival and the guitar-making competition. The competition has brought makers to Granada from Japan, China, Thailand, Germany, USA, Italy, France, all parts of Spain and from many other countries. Concerts during past editions have been offered by Margarita Escarpa, Pepe Romero, the LA guitar quartet, José Miguel Moreno, Rafael Aguirre, Alexei Khorev, Javier Riba, Mabel Millán, Juan Habichuela Nieto and many, many more. There is no date yet for the guitar-making competition but here you can find the programme for this year’s festival. The photo shows programming from the first three editions. I didn’t save anything from the fourth.