Every guitar you have ever heard — flamenco, classical, even the acoustic on a pop record — owes a debt to a quiet Andalusian named Antonio de Torres. Working in Almería and Seville in the mid-1800s, he settled the design questions everyone else was still arguing about.

His breakthrough was inside the box. Torres fanned the thin wooden braces beneath the soundboard and enlarged the body, freeing the top to vibrate and giving the guitar far more volume, warmth and balance than anything before it. He even proved the point by building a guitar with papier-mâché sides — and it still sang.

He standardised the scale length and the proportions luthiers use to this day. Pick up a modern classical guitar and you are, essentially, holding a Torres. The great makers who followed refined his idea; almost none of them replaced it.

It is a very Andalusian story: no fanfare, no fortune — Torres died poor — just a craftsman quietly perfecting an object until the whole world adopted it without quite learning his name.