This tiny corner bar on a backstreet of Seville’s Macarena neighbourhood is filled to the brim. The room is thick with perspiration. Most of the audience members stand with their arms pinned to their sides and drinks stuck permanently at waist height, only able to nod their heads and tap their feet to the rhythm on Taberna Gonzalo Molina’s faded tile floor.
Some try to get a better view by standing on chairs at the back of the room, while the gradually swelling group of people gathering at the doors attempt to lean inside to catch a glimpse of the musicians, the smoke from their cigarettes drifting into the room and mixing with a heady mix of sweat, must, and the sickly sweet odour of dozens of vino de naranja.
At the front of the bar, the synchronized strumming of two guitarists intensifies as flailing fingers fly over frets and strings, struggling to match a tempo that keeps getting faster and faster. To my untrained ears, the syncopated notes sound like unbridled, building noise, but a soulful tune is can be heard hiding in the maelstrom. A good flamenco performance creeps up and seduces you slowly.
From a gap in the audience, a woman lets out mournful wails in deep, guttural Spanish. It has more in common with middle eastern singing than anything Mediterranean. Despite sounding full of sorrow, she is beaming cheek to cheek as she stamps her feet and claps slowly with her hands, weaving them around her midriff and up above her head.
Flamenco is as much a part of the city’s identity as the ornate Islamic architecture, the Metropol Parasol and the sweet-smelling oranges that dangle from trees in every city square. Small boutiques offer racks of colourful flamenco outfits and even in the city’s flea markets, you will find bright, ruffled dresses in amongst the antiques and kitsch religious memorabilia. There are flamenco fiestas and each evening dozens of theatres throughout the city host shows for intrigued tourists. Distinctive flamenco rhythms can be heard everywhere. Just wandering around the tourist hotspots of Plaza Espana or The Cathedral of Saint Mary, you will see dancers in flowing dresses, sometimes on their own, some times with a partner, precision hand-clapping and dancing for a few Euros from the gathered audience.
However, the most authentic form of Flamenco originates in Seville’s working-class neighbourhood of Triana where the district’s Roma people sang evocatively about their lives and struggles in solemn but sensuous laments. Drifting to Spain from the east in the 15th century, they put down roots in Seville, living in communal corrales de vecinos, cramped tenement blocks surrounding courtyards that served as communal and social spaces for the Roma’s ebullient juergas, or parties. Infusing Spanish folklore with sounds of North Africa the east, the wailing laments of flamenco music soon spread beyond the juergas of Triana and was popularised throughout Andalucía in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. In 2010, flamenco was listed as something of Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO.
The majority of tourists to Seville will flock to see flamenco shows at Tablaos, theatres that offer highly choreographed music and dance spectaculars that often include dinner and drinks with the €30-40 ticket price. While it’s of no doubt that these venues offer incredible music and high-quality performances, they often attract a sneer and eye-roll from flamenco aficionados that consider them inauthentic, lacking the spontaneity and passion that are integral to pure, traditional flamenco.
More authentic and intimate performances can be found in some of Seville’s cultural centres and institutions. Here you will find shows that connect with flamenco’s roots by focusing less on commercial songs and more on earthy Roma-derived music. One of the most popular the nightly, 9 pm show (€15) that takes place on the greenery-filled 18th-century patio of The Casa de la Memoria de Al-Andalus, tucked away amongst the narrow streets and colourful buildings of the city’s Santa Cruz quarter. Alternatively, the Museo del Baile Flamenco opened in 2010 by celebrated dancer Cristina Hoyos, offers shows each evening once the museum’s exhibits have closed.
To truly experience the spirit of flamenco though, I am told that you have to frequent Seville’s peñas, small private clubs conceived and maintained by aficionados dedicated to preserving the art, and bars. However, peñas can be hard to come by and your best bet in finding them is through word of mouth or posters taped to walls. The bars are much the same. While some have regularly scheduled flamenco nights, such as Bar Anselma in the flamenco crucible of Triana where the queues begin to form at midnight for the rambunctious show, for others you may have to wander Seville’s streets until you are lucky enough to stumble upon a performance in an unmarked bar, and let the music lure you in.
That’s how I find myself in the Taberna Gonzalo Molina on a Thursday night. The bar’s sign is mostly covered – I had passed by during the day and barely registered the building – but people are spilling out of the doorway into the cobbled street, jostling to peer inside. It’s the music that draws me in. I squeeze past a wall of people towards the bar. It’s dark, stuffy and my trainers stick to the floor, giving out a slight ripping sound with each and every step. The walls are covered in old sepia and black and white photographs of flamenco stars, matadors and cinema legends, with a few Latin American revolutionaries – Che Guevara, Jose Marti and Camilo Cienfuegos – thrown in for good measure.
The barman stands at the venues one beer tap, quickly pouring €1 glasses of Cruzcampo into cloudy tumblers without a care, his eyes fixed on the performers rather than his customers. I look around and decide to order the same as almost everyone else, a shot of sickly sweet vino de naranja.
The performance starts slowly, with two guitarists sat side by side, strumming gently, but gradually the sound builds. When it finally kicks off, it’s akin to a mad jamming session with cacophonous contributions – in the form of claps, yowls and Oles – from the cheek-to-cheek audience and spontaneous outbreaks of dancing for those close enough to the singers. It isn’t a choreographed performance. There aren’t any colourful dresses or maracas. It is spontaneous, ramshackle and soulful. A new guitarist begins his rapid strumming and another singer begins telling her Roma folk tales.
This is flamenco at its unadulterated best – a raw, uncompromising, yet uplifting spectacle where an artist bares their soul in every verse. This tiny corner bar on a backstreet of Seville’s Macarena shows that in order to find the best flamenco in Seville, you don’t have to look for a showy spectacle in a 400-seat theatre, you just need to wander the streets and let the music guide you.
