Peña La Platería
A “Peña Flamenca” is a flamenco club, and they range from people’s homes where people get together to hang out, sing and play to big establishments with stages where flamenco is performed for an audience. In the 1990’s when I lived in Granada there was one Peña that always seemed to have the best flamenco going on there, but that I wasn’t allowed to go to because I wasn’t a member – La Platería. Every now and then my guitar-maker friend Francisco Manuel Diaz, who was a member, would invite me to go with him, and on certain occasions they’d open the place to the public for shows or workshops. But it seemed you had to be pretty well-connected to be a member (and I wasn’t that), so it was always a bit out of reach and I’d always hear about the great performances I’d missed out on.
Back then I did regularly go to a different Peña – one that was much more open to anyone and where I ended up having some of my first opportunities to play for singers. This was the peña El Niño De Las Las Almendras, in the home of a singer and aficionado of the same name, and a place where I learned a ton about playing for singers (you can read some more about here).
The History
Peña La Platería has a pretty amazing history, some of which tells us a lot about the history of Spain and about how Spaniards have viewed flamenco over the years. The founders of the Peña claim that its roots are in the meetings that lead to the famous 1922 Cante Jondo competition organized by none other than Manuel de Falla and Federico Garcia Lorca, among others, though the peña wasn’t officially organized until 1949.
The Franco government’s laws against assembly required a Secret Service agent be present at their early meetings to “chaperone,” and apparently the first agent slept through the meetings, where they would listen to records of flamenco and discuss. They also mention in their official history that though the prohibition of women attending peña meetings may today seem “machista,” it also would have been illegal for women to attend and could landed the members in prison. And it’s interesting to note that among the very first members were a Frenchman who sang por Caña and a Belgian painter, so the history of non-Spanish members is nothing new.
It was called La Platería (the silversmith’s shop) because they initially met at a silversmith’s shop. But when a bullfighting newspaper published the story of a Granada silversmith who hosted a group of flamenco-loving “undesirables”, the silversmith, lost all of his business as it was considered a disgrace at the time. [I’ve heard many differing accounts about how hostile or not Franco’s Spain was to flamenco. Here’s one interesting article on the subject for those of you who read Spanish: Was Franco a Flamenco?].
30 years later…
La Platería is still one of the best places in Granada to see great flamenco, but this time around Tara and I are members. This means we get to see all of that great flamenco on a weekly basis, and we get to invite our friends who otherwise would miss out. We feel very privileged to have this great opportunity, and to be connected to what some claim is the oldest flamenco peña in Spain. Since the Platería reopened after the lockdown we’ve seen some of the best, most intimate flamenco of our lives in this amazing space.
And we feel incredibly grateful to be allowed to shoot some of our videos at the Platería, on this amazing stage where so many of the flamenco greats of the past 50 years have performed. We shot our first Cante Play-Along videos at the peña this past week with the fantastic up-and-coming singer El Turry and with percussionist Miguel El Cheyenne.
A bit more common
These days cities have tons of flamenco peñas and there are plenty of them in the more real areas, too. Many of them are open to public on some level, and you can almost always tag along with a friend who knows the peña or is a member. They generally don’t publicize their activities the way Tablaos and theaters do, but if you ask around about the local peña wherever you happen to be in Spain you may find a great source of flamenco activity that’s almost guaranteed not to be touristy. And if you’re in Granada look us up and if it’s a Saturday night maybe we’ll be able to invite you to a show!
Hi Kai. Thanks for this. Although I lived in Granada for several months on two occasions most of it is news to me. My teacher was a Calo gypsy who lived in a cave below Alto San Miguel. Not one of the flash cave houses – he was poor. My tuition fees funded a pozo ciego, which I helped dig, and a washhouse and bathroom. The ayuntamiento, which helped the family in many ways, nevertheless constantly pressured him to move into the semi-ghetto in the Poligono district. He grew up under the oppression of his people and it was extremely difficult to get him to talk about it. Even when we were alone in my little flat in the Albaicin he would talk in a whisper when describing the hardships his family had lived through. Mariano found it galling that flamenco had become emblematic of Castilian Spain, the dancer in an extravagant dress having become virtually the logo for Southern Spain.
Have you ever been to Sabreen’s full moon tablaos below the Alto? Her cueva has a wonderful terrace overlooking the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada, a glorious sight under the full moon and she gets really great talent in (but don’t drink the wine!) It’s just off that ridiculous concrete pathway – she puts a sign out, the only advertising needed beyond word of mouth.
Hey Christopher – Thanks so much for this! My teacher in the 90’s was already in the Poligono, but I heard these stories quite a bit. Fascinating that you got to live some of it. And the tablao you mention sounds really familiar but I don’t think I’ve ever been. We’ll have to look out for that now! When were you here?
Also, a friend is here shooting a documentary about flamenco and he was just asking about the role of flamenco in Spanish society, so his comments about Official Spain co-opting the art form are also very interesting.
Cheers,
Kai
I was there in 2016 and 2017, but I know Sabreen still runs her full-moon tablaos because I sometimes get the Facebook notices. There may be breaks when she goes off travelling, as I guess we’d expect.