Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Flamenco dancer Lisi Sfair performs at Cardamomo, one of few tablaos still open.
Flamenco dancer Lisi Sfair performs at Cardamomo, one of few tablaos still open. Photograph: Denis Doyle/The Guardian
Flamenco dancer Lisi Sfair performs at Cardamomo, one of few tablaos still open. Photograph: Denis Doyle/The Guardian

'It's impossible': Spain's flamenco bars face an existential threat

This article is more than 3 years old

Plummeting audience numbers fuel calls for government assistance as famed tablaos struggle to survive

A little after 7.30pm on Wednesday night, a small crowd gathered in a dark, brick-lined bar in central Madrid to sit at candlelit, socially-distanced tables and lose themselves for an hour in the sweat, shouts and blurred hands, hems and heels of a flamenco show.

The 16 people in the audience at the Cardamomo tablao, or flamenco venue, were in luck – but then so were the eight performers on stage. Neither flamenco’s iconic place in Spanish culture nor its global status as part of Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity has spared it the pains and penalties of the Covid pandemic.

Starved of the tourists on whom they depend for 80% of their income, Spain’s tablaos are now facing an existential crisis.

“Before the pandemic started, there were 93 tablaos in Spain,” said Juan Manuel del Rey, the president of Spain’s National Association of Flamenco Tablaos. “So far, more than 30% of them have closed for good.”

The situation in the capital is even worse: in the past year, six of Madrid’s 22 tablaos have shut. Among them was one of the city’s oldest and best known venues, the Villa Rosa, which staged a final outdoor performance to mourn its end earlier this month.

Many Madrid tablao proprietors say the current Covid restrictions – which require venues to operate at 50% of their capacity and with a 1.5m space between tables – make opening prohibitively expensive.

“Most tablaos have capacity of 80-100 and under the rules, you get in about 30 people,” says Del Rey, who runs the Corral de la Morería tablao his father founded in 1956.

“If you’ve got nine or 10 high-level performers as well as the rest of your staff, you’ve got more people than there are in the whole audience. It’s logistically impossible.”

Those Madrid tablaos that remain open tend to do so only at weekends when business is better. Cardamomo, however, reopened last November and is, as its director, Lucas Portolés, puts it, “clawing its way back, bit-by-bit and centimetre-by-centimetre” with weekday shows.

It currently stages around five shows a week – down from 28 before Covid hit. Although the tablao has been open for 26 years, Portolés likes to explain to his audiences that the pandemic means it’s really been operating for “25 plus one”.

Still, he added, “we feel lucky and privileged to be here. We may not have gone back to normal, but at least we’ve gone back to doing something”.

‘Flamenco has been through tough times and wars before, and it will survive’ ... Paula Rodríguez. Photograph: Denis Doyle/The Guardian

The sentiment is echoed by Lisi Sfair, one of the bailaoras, or dancers, at Cardamomo.

“Right now I feel very lucky to because I’m able to work in one of the very few tablaos that’s still open,” she said. “We’ve been working Wednesday to Sunday but it’s still been difficult, and morale in the flamenco world is pretty low.”

The lack of audiences and performances has hit some flamenco artists harder than others. Last year, a group of performers set up the Doña Flamenco NGO to help flamenco artists unable to make ends meet. Its four foodbanks – in Madrid, Málaga, Seville and Granada – are assisting about 50 people by providing everything from rice, oil and chickpeas to cleaning products, nappies and formula.

“Some people are happy to come in and pick up the food, but there are others who prefer people not to know their circumstances, so we take food to them,” said one volunteer.

“One of the people we’re helping in Madrid is very well known in the flamenco world and has spent their life working and performing with the greatest flamenco stars. But they can’t work now and have a household of 10 people – including children and grandchildren – to support.”

The Spanish government has set up a fund to help artists weather the pandemic and also spent almost €2.2m on supporting the flamenco sector in 2020 – including €232,000 in payments to six tablaos. The regional government of Madrid invested more than €1.1m in flamenco last year, while the city council spent €7.5m on staving off the threat of closure for the capital’s theatres, concert halls and tablaos over the same period.

But Del Rey and many of his colleagues feel the authorities – and especially the central government – should be doing much more by helping them to cover their costs while they wait to reopen properly next year. They also point out that tablaos – which provide work for 95% of Spain’s flamenco artists – have, for decades, acted as the “universities of flamenco” where skills and knowledge are acquired, tested and shared.

“There are only about 60 tablaos in Spain now so it’s not like we’re asking for much,” said Del Rey. “If the paintings in the Prado were falling to pieces, no one would question the need for an urgent rescue plan to stop them being lost for ever. But that’s exactly what’s happening with the tablaos and with flamenco.”

There may, however, be one tiny upside to the current crisis. The lack of tourists has led more Madrileños to venture into the capital’s tablaos, many of them for the first time.

Laura Abadía, musical director and principal soloist for the Cardamomo show – and the possessor of the devastatingly potent voice that was shortly to be unleashed on the Wednesday night crowd – welcomes the belated arrival of the new visitors.

“We are,” she said, “a country that finds it hard to value our own culture.”

Her bailaora colleague Paula Rodríguez remains phlegmatic about the future of her art, and delights in the crowds that make up in applause what they lack in numbers.

“Flamenco is going through a very bad time right now and things are really tough,” she said. “But it’s been through tough times and wars before, and it will survive.”

Most viewed

Most viewed