A busy start to the year for Ubrique's leather training school
A dedicated leather craftsmanship training centre in the small Spanish town of Ubrique has celebrated its seventh birthday.
In those seven years, the school has trained more than 450 people, many of whom now work in town’s leathergoods workshops.
Courses on offer at the moment are for small leathergoods manufacturers and for sewing-machine operators. At the start of this year, the school began working with its fifteenth intake of students for the leathergoods manufacturers’ course and intakes eleven and twelve for its sewing-machine operators’ course, with one group attending in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Also at the start of 2023, the regional government in Andalusia gave formal recognition to these two courses, placing them on a dedicated list of specialist artisan training opportunities available in this part of Spain.
The school’s director, Juan Enrique Gutiérrez, recently told local radio that people from other industrial sectors were increasingly being attracted to retrain as leathergoods artisans.
Prominent brands that work with Ubrique’s leathergoods artisans to produce their collections include Loewe, Dior, Givenchy and Strathberry.
