‘I'm terrible with dates,’ he warns us right at the start of our conversation. Alfredo Teixeira, 60, began playing music before he ever imagined building instruments. He taught himself to play stringed instruments ‘around the age of 14’ and has been a ‘more or less self-taught’ builder since 2006. He started by building a cavaquinho and then several violins – an instrument he also plays – until he made his first Portuguese guitar.

At the age of 18, he went to study electric guitar at the Porto Jazz School, but gave up; he studied architecture for three years until, at the age of 21, he decided to study violin at the Porto Conservatory. ‘At the time, it was a bit strange because I was taking classes with seven- and eight-year-olds,’ he recalls. He played the mandolin in Vai de Roda, a traditional music group, and in JIG, a Celtic music group. ‘After that, I'm not quite sure what I did, but I was always doing a lot of things.’ He even had an event planning company with his brother and composed music for theatre (he worked for many years with Circolando). Music never left his life, it just changed form.

Over two decades, this violin maker – ‘there's no need to say luthier because I'm Portuguese’ – has lost count of the instruments he has built, as well as those that have come into his hands for repair. Alfredo admits that he started building ‘because I wanted to have cool instruments to play’. “Then I started to like it more and more because you never know exactly what the result will be; no matter how much you try to improve it, there are many factors, starting with the wood, which is never the same, and which is perhaps the main factor in making all instruments different,” he says.

In addition to patience, skill and the shellac finish — which prolongs the completion of the work by months — it is the wood that dictates how an instrument will sound. Walnut and rosewood are the woods that the luthier uses as raw materials to build his instruments. He tells us that in Portugal, ‘the most expensive instruments are made of rosewood and the cheapest are made of walnut,’ but that he currently buys his wood online, ‘and Indian rosewood is cheaper than walnut.’

Alfredo began by showing his work to a few friends, ‘and from there, things started to happen.’ ‘Today, fortunately, there are more people building instruments in the country, but when I started building Portuguese guitars, there weren't any. There must have been four or five people with some renown building instruments,’ he says.

Silence, the fado is about to be sung

It's six o'clock in the afternoon, and Casa da Guitarra, on Avenida de Vímara Peres, near the upper deck of the Luiz I Bridge, is already packed – tourists eagerly awaiting to hear the fado being sung. Alfredo's Portuguese guitar and Rogério Rocha's fado guitar are already on stage, ready for the musicians who will accompany the two fado singers performing that evening, Carla Cortez and Isa de Castro.

This venue has become part of the city's tourist itineraries. There are fado sessions every day. In the summer, there are up to three sessions a day. ‘We were the first venue, and now there are 16 venues – and no one gets in each other's way, there's room for everyone. They are mainly tourists, there are few Portuguese,’ says the musician shortly before performing. ‘A tradition has been created in Porto that didn't exist before. Street fado already existed, but it wasn't customary to have fado in the late afternoon. And here in Porto, just as people come to watch the sunset at Jardim do Morro, they also come to listen to fado.’

The idea of one day creating Casa da Guitarra came from a memory from his adolescence: Alfredo had bought a guitar that ‘was very difficult to play because it was very hard,’ and he was advised to go to the workshop of luthier Domingos Cerqueira, in Costa Cabral, ‘a very important figure in the history of the guitar in Porto.’ ‘When I entered the workshop, I was really amazed because he was there with his tools, working, accompanied by a bunch of people playing and singing, and that never left my mind,’ he recalls.

It was during the pandemic, and then with the rise in rents, that Casa da Guitarra lost square metres and free music lessons and acoustic concerts, as well as the construction and restoration of instruments live. Even so, and despite only operating in a single space, which also houses a permanent exhibition of Portuguese string instruments, it continues to promote various workshops. The next one will take place on the 14th of this month; it is a Portuguese guitar workshop, led by José Manuel Neto, a renowned master of the Lisbon Guitar, who on the same day, at 9:30 pm, will give a concert at the Monastery of São Bento da Vitória, accompanied by Pedro Santos on the accordion and Carlos Manuel Proença on the fado guitar.

The guitar that ‘fell by the wayside’ — the one from Porto

Alfredo's first encounter with one of these old ‘tiny guitars’ with a flower on the scroll [head] took place in António Duarte's workshop. ‘I tried to find out the story behind it.’ He discovered a forgotten model, predating the standardisation of Lisbon and Coimbra. ‘Some people said it was a lady's guitar because it had a flower on the scroll,’ he says. ‘That's not true because these guitars had completely different heads; some had flowers, others had faces — I even found one whose head was a bulldog with a cigar,’ he laughs.

But what are the characteristics of the Porto model? "It was smaller and, normally, the side was narrower. It was made of maple or sycamore — the sound characteristics of both woods are very similar, and the decoration was extremely simple.‘ And, by the way, he notes that the Coimbra guitar may have ’inherited a little of that simplicity,‘ because the Lisbon guitar ’is full of mother-of-pearl and is more exuberant." ‘I have a theory, based on the guitars that have come to me for repairs, that the tear [on the head of the Coimbra guitar] is a kind of simplification of the flower [on the Porto guitar],’ he concludes.