The tradition of the tuna is no less than eight hundred years old, according to TU/e Built Environment student Obbay el Kashef. El Kashef – alias Burro – plays the bandurria, a Spanish twelve-string mandolin. He does so in La Tuna Ciudad de Luz, or the Tuna of the City of Light, Eindhoven. 

The troupe of musical TU/e students, recognizable by their medieval costumes, has been around since 1964. Tunos, or cheerful student troubadours, are an integral part of student life in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. But how did tuna end up so far north in Eindhoven?

Students from the ‘Technische Hogeschool’ (as TU/e was then known) came across it during a trip to the Costa Brava, according to the La Tuna Ciudad de Luz website. They decided to add a touch of tuna to their association's initiation ceremony, and that's how the seed was planted. 

“As early as the Middle Ages, even before universities existed there, students traveled through Iberia to take lessons from different teachers. These first tunos discovered that traveling became easier if they carried an instrument with them,” says Obbay el Kashef. “This allowed them to play music in inns along the way, often in exchange for food, a bed, or some money. In Spain, they were therefore called sopistas, literally meaning ‘soup students’.” 

With the rise of universities, tuna became an integral part of Spanish student life, El Kashef continues. Texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bear witness to this. “In them, teachers encourage students to make music to pay for their textbooks. And tunos complain about the difficulty of their studies and describe how tuna helps them forget their worries.”

Comandos

Noche de Tuna is the name of the annual tuna event in Eindhoven. La Tuna Ciudad de Luz organizes it together with sister association La Tuniña and former members who are still closely involved. 

“Four Spanish tuna groups are coming to Eindhoven to perform, and we are also expecting a few groups who won't be on stage but will be joining the party, the so-called comandos,” says El Kashef.

What makes the atmosphere of a tuna performance so infectious? Apart from the southern sounds, the visible history, and the student humor, El Kashef believes it is the stories told by the songs, “about traveling, jokes, pranks, and sometimes romance.”

Corona hall

The international ensemble will be performing this Friday from 16:00 on the Markt in the city center. What is new, however, is that they will also be doing a show on Saturday afternoon on the TU/e campus, in the Corona hall in Luna, El Kashef explains.

“We want to bring the campus to life with music and introduce students to the tuna culture. And of course, it's also a great opportunity to show our friends from Spain how beautiful our university is—just as we enjoy visiting the universities in Madrid, Málaga, and Barcelona on our musical trips.”

Noche de Tuna: Friday 19 September 16:00-20:00 uur on the Markt and Saturday 20 September 14:00-18:00 in the Corona hall (Luna). Admission is free on both days

This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor