By Rafe Calder
The first fact is also the first disagreement. Wikipedia says Antonio de Torres was born on 13 June 1817 in AlmerÃa. A guitar hobby site, guitarinsite.nl, gives his birthplace as La Cañada de San Urbano. AlmerÃa is a city. La Cañada de San Urbano is a village near it, which Wikipedia names as the place he died. So the two sources may be pointing to the same neighbourhood from different distances. That is our reading, and neither source says it.
Dates and places
Wikipedia says he died on 19 November 1892 in La Cañada de San Urbano. The hobby site gives the village as his birthplace, which puts his birth and death in the same place if it is right. If Wikipedia is right, he was born in the city and came back to the village at the end. We do not know which, and neither do we have a document to settle it.
The hobby site says he trained as a carpenter and served an apprenticeship under José Pernas. That is a hobby site, and the claim has no second source in our notes, so treat it as a single-source line. Wikipedia says he worked in Seville from about 1852 to 1870 and was back in AlmerÃa about 1870.
What he changed
Wikipedia credits him with two changes that shaped the classical guitar. One is fan bracing, the arrangement of thin struts on the underside of the soundboard in a fan pattern. The other is a larger body. Together these altered how much sound the instrument could project, and how loud it could be in a room. That explanation is general knowledge about guitar construction and not a statement from the article, so we mark it as our reading.
Wikipedia also mentions an 1862 guitar of papier-mâché. It is a striking detail. It suggests he was testing how much of a guitar’s sound comes from the soundboard rather than from the sides and back, though that, again, is our reading and not the article’s. We do not give the details of how the instrument was built.
He is linked in the article to two names, Tárrega and Arcas. The article records their connection to his instruments. We have left out the dates that go with them, because our notes carry two different years for one of them and we would rather not guess.
The shop
At some point he kept a shop selling tableware and crystal. Wikipedia says so in plain terms. For a maker of instruments it is a surprising detail, and it is a reminder that guitar making at the time was not always a steady living on its own. That last clause is our inference and not the article’s.
How many guitars?
The hobby site says he made about 320 guitars. Wikipedia, in the lines we read, says that in his later years he built roughly a dozen a year. Those two statements can both be true, since one is a lifetime total and the other a rate. But the total of 320 is one site’s figure, and a dozen a year over a working life of several decades would not obviously produce it. We do not reconcile the two and recommend caution with both.
Dates in order
- 13 June 1817: born, according to Wikipedia.
- About 1852 to 1870: in Seville, according to Wikipedia.
- 1862: papier-mâché guitar, according to Wikipedia.
- About 1870: back in AlmerÃa, according to Wikipedia.
- 19 November 1892: died, according to Wikipedia.
Side by side
Wikipedia gives dates and the main design changes. Guitarinsite.nl gives a birthplace, a training and a total. They overlap only on the broad outline. Where they differ, on the birthplace and on the number of guitars, we show both.
What kind of sources these are
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia anyone can edit. Guitarinsite.nl is a hobby site and not a museum or a luthiers’ guild. A museum catalogue or a biography with notes would be a better base, and we recommend one before this goes anywhere beyond a short feature.
Questions a buyer would ask
Torres is a name that gets attached to a lot of guitars, so the plain questions matter. Is the instrument a surviving original, a copy of his design, or a guitar in the style he established? Those are three different things, and Wikipedia’s account of fan bracing and the larger body is a description of a design, not a guarantee of authorship. How does the seller know? Is there a label, a document, a museum record? We have not seen one and do not claim one. Anyone describing such an instrument should name the source of its attribution in the first line.
Why the birthplace matters less than the bench
The disagreement over AlmerÃa and La Cañada de San Urbano is a real one, and we have shown it. But it is a question of biography and not of sound. What survives in the record, on the sources we read, is a set of design choices: struts laid out in a fan, a body made larger, an experimental guitar of papier-mâché in 1862. A reader can set the place of birth aside and still learn the part that mattered.
What we left out
We left out the prices that Torres guitars sell for, since they are a market statistic and change constantly. We left out lists of surviving instruments and where they are held. We left out tonal descriptions of any individual guitar, because we have not heard one and a source’s adjectives are not evidence.
Roam first. Shop later.