Construction of Traditional Chordophones

The construction of traditional Portuguese chordophones is an artisanal craft that brings together, around the workshop of the violeiro, the making of the various regional violas, the cavaquinho and the Portuguese guitar. It is one of the most demanding arts of popular culture: unlike simpler instruments, a chordophone requires weighing the quality of the different woods, the size of the soundbox, the length of the neck and the tuning. The knowledge is transmitted through practice and experimentation, often in a family setting, and it carried through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, remaining active to this day — proof of its capacity to adapt.

The violeiro’s workshop

The trade of the violeiro has been documented in Portugal since the early seventeenth century, with references to the construction of string instruments in Braga and Guimarães. In Guimarães, the Regiment for the trade of violeiro, dated 1719, already lists various chordophones among the «species» of the craft, a sign of an organised guild and an established tradition.

The choice of woods is decisive and follows a precise acoustic logic. For the back and the sides — whose function is to reflect the sound — denser woods are used, such as lime, walnut or cherry. For the soundboard, which must vibrate, thinner and lighter woods are employed: the finest soundboards were traditionally made of Flanders pine, with lime or poplar used more commonly. The neck is often carved from mahogany and the fingerboard from ebony. Each piece is worked by hand, glued and fitted in a process that can take days before a tuned instrument is born.

A family of instruments

The traditional Portuguese chordophones form a diverse family, with well-defined regional variants. The violas are divided, according to the ethnomusicologist Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, into two large groups according to the shape of the body: those with a pronounced waist, from the interior, and those with a slight waist, with a figure-of-eight body. Among them are the viola amarantina (Douro Litoral), the viola braguesa (Minho), the viola beiroa (Beira Baixa), the viola toeira (Beira Litoral) and the viola campaniça (Alentejo), as well as the wire-strung island violas of the Azores and Madeira.

To this family also belong the small, bright cavaquinho, a four-stringed instrument of Minho origin — ancestor of the Hawaiian ukulele and the Caribbean cuatro — and the Portuguese guitar, an instrument with twelve strings in pairs and a pear-shaped body, inseparable from fado. Each of these chordophones demands its own techniques, but shares the same workshop universe and the same gesture of popular lutherie.

Recognition and safeguarding

The vitality of this art led to its institutional recognition. In 2022, the «Traditional knowledge and practices of cavaquinho construction» were inscribed on the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage, by order of the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage of 17 October that year. The traditional construction of cavaquinhos is most strongly expressed in the Northwest of Portugal, but it extends to other regions and to the islands, where the Madeiran braguinha is made.

This recognition values not only the instruments, but the body of master violeiros who ensure the continuity of the craft. Its survival depends on transmission to new generations of artisans, in a balance between fidelity to inherited techniques and adaptation to new materials and markets — a heritage in which the traditional Portuguese sound continues to be born from the hands of those who build it.