The workshop has been here for more than 150 years. Not this exact configuration of walls and tools, perhaps, but the work itself—the steady transformation of Colombian cedar into tiples, bandolas, requintos, charangos. Enrique Galvis, 66, inherited this corner of La Candelaria from his father, who inherited it from his father, a cabinetmaker who understood wood in the particular way people understood things before generalization took over.
"I've been here since I can remember," Enrique says, running his hand along a piece of cedar in its first stage of becoming.
"Since I was a kid, I've been listening to musicians, been in an atelier. This is just what I know."
The workshop smells of sawdust and varnish. Wood in various stages of transformation occupies every surface—raw planks still bearing the geometry of the forest, curved pieces soaking in their molds, instruments nearly complete waiting for their final polish. Enrique picks up what he calls "a piece"—a section of cedar trunk—and traces its journey: from this, to sheets, through the machine for shaping, then the endless process of polishing, sanding, refining. "Keep and keep," he says, using the phrase again and again. "You never finish polishing. The client leaves and you still want to keep polishing."
He knows cedar by color and weight, by how it lets itself be worked. Pink and it's quality. Yellow and it's better for furniture. His father knew more—could identify Catatumbo cedar, Caquetá cedar, Huila cedar by smell and grain. "He knew their names, their smells, everything. I didn't learn that. That's the only thing I forgot." What Enrique did inherit was something deeper: the ability to hear an instrument before it exists, to know what sound sleeps in the wood waiting to be released.
"I know the sound," he says simply. A lifetime of listening will do that.