Flamenco, Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

Flamenco was born out of joy but grew through rage, between loneliness and the conviviality of the fiesta. Son of grace and desperation, of mockery and angst, of the diversity and the mixture among the settled population and the nomads that crossed the South of the Iberian Peninsula for centuries,

Above all, flamenco is music: a rhythmical legacy passed down through cante (flamenco singing), toque (flamenco guitar playing), baile (flamenco dancing) and percussion. However, it is also an attitude towards life and a form of individual and collective resistance that is cultivated in many parts of the world today.

Flamenco artists, across its three expressions—singing, dancing, and guitar playing—play an essential role in preserving and spreading flamenco through learning, performing, and recording its various forms.

This art form, in its origins and preservation, is a blend of Andalusian Castilian and Romani influences, with echoes of Moorish, Sephardic, Castilian from other regions, Indio, and African cultures, among many other cultural resonances.

For countless individuals, whether alone or with others, flamenco represents their vital rhythm and one of their primary identifiers. It is a spectacle and a culture, but also a family experience, a learning process, and a cherished custom.

Flamenco is music, and its tonal essence can be written on the staves of paper or on those of the soul. It also embodies a set of customs, a way of being and behaving.

Like any oral tradition, flamenco has its habitat—families, neighborhoods, and unique rituals like family gatherings—where it's learned, transmitted, and absorbed.

So, why didn't flamenco emerge elsewhere in Europe, even though the Romani people journeyed across the continent in a long exodus that began 1,500 years ago from northern India and Pakistan?

Because it's not solely the product of their instinct. It's also a fruit of other cultures present on the Iberian Peninsula. Even after 1492, following the fall of the Kingdom of Granada, Arab-Andalusian music may have secretly coexisted with Sephardic songs within nomadic communities...

...with Castilian ballads, with the African percussion of enslaved and freed people in Andalusia, and even with what centuries later would be dubbed "cantes de ida y vuelta" (round-trip songs) along the immense maritime avenue of the Carrera de Indias.

There's something more. Flamenco is magic: "Everything that has dark sounds has duende," the cantaor Manuel Torre famously told the writer Federico García Lorca. It's also chutzpah and spark. Hunger and success. Intimate custom and public spectacle. Industry and memory.

Its universe spans from the mourning of the toná to the grace of a dancer's footwork (escobillas) and the rasping of guitars. Gestures, glances, and a simple cry (quejío) born from the depths of the earth or a human being also hold immense power.