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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Sam Jones in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain

The rumba radio station, the DJ … and 110,000 albums looking for a noisy new home

Alejandra Fierro Eleta in yellow standing between two large posters from her collection.
Alejandra Fierro Eleta, also known as Gladys Palmera, with part of her vast collection last week. Photograph: Denis Doyle/the Observer

On a hillside an hour from Madrid, not far from the sepulchral splendour of the Escorial monastery, with its royal tombs, imperial maps and sacred relics, lies another, rather less austere, treasure house.

The Gladys Palmera collection, kept in a sprawling, tropical-hued complex crammed with 1950s Mexican film posters and prowled by the odd decorative monkey and jaguar, is the largest private archive of Latin American music in the world.

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