Easy access to other cultures means that flamenco as an art is alive and developing, guitarist Paco Peña tells Arminta Wallace.

Leafy north London is a tranquil sort of place at mid-day in early summer. As I scour the map, searching for the quickest route to the house of one of the world's greatest flamenco guitarists, it occurs to me that this orderly suburb is definitely not the sort of place where you'd expect to find one of the world's greatest flamenco guitarists. It exudes more of a classical sort of vibe. But then, Paco Peña is one of those rare musicians who is as at home on the classical concert platforms of London's Wigmore Hall and Amsterdam's Concertgebouw as he is amid the whirling emotions of flamenco.

When he takes part in the Walton's Guitar Festival of Ireland in Dublin this week, however, he will be bringing a group of singers and dancers with him, and the vibe will most definitely be flamenco.

"There is a great vitality about Spain," Peña muses as I'm supplied with a hospitable cup of coffee and settled in an airy front room. "I'm not boasting, now - it's a fact, particularly in the south. If you add this indigenous vitality and energy to the mix of cultural influences which have arrived in Andalucia over centuries - the influence of Phoenicians, Jews, Arabs, gypsies from India - then you get an instantly recognisable character in the music. And not only in the music. There is an interesting parallel with flamenco in bull-fighting, I think. The split-second timing, the confrontation with reality in a life-changing kind of way - flamenco has a lot of that drama."

Peña is tiny, slight and serious. He speaks English almost as rapidly and fluidly as he plays the guitar. Almost. Listening to live recordings, it's hard to credit that such virtuosity exists - let alone that he has developed it without having ever had a single formal guitar lesson. He wriggles in his armchair. Pluck-y instruments, he protests, are easy to play. "My brother played the guitar, so I suppose that was why I picked it up," he says.

Growing up in Cordoba in the 1940s, there wasn't a great deal for kids to do: no TV, no Internet, no computer games. "You go with what is around you - the most immediate thing. And then when you like it, when you find that it enriches you . . ." He shrugs. "For me it was a pretty significant tool in my communication with people. So I took it really seriously. I just played and played and played.

"Incidentally," he adds, though it isn't incidental at all, "we were very poor. We lived in a house with 10 other families. We had two rooms, other people had one room, or two, or whatever. And so any celebration - indeed any mourning, anything that happened - was very much shared by everybody. Fiestas and parties took place on the patio which we all shared; and so it wasn't just my family, but all the people in all the families contributed to whatever was going on. I learned from everybody around me."

From the age of 14, he also taught the guitar. "I don't know how it came about, really," he says. "I suppose I tried to make a few shillings, or a few pesetas, teaching a bunch of people. What did I know? Well, whatever I knew they wanted to know. Interestingly it taught me a lot as well - to have to, you know, articulate what is happening in the music. To analyse. All that taught me many things."

He still teaches, although these days he does it at the course he founded at the Rotterdam Conservatoire, where students arrive with guitars and leave with degrees in flamenco performance. As part of the guitar festival he will also give a master-class in Dublin on Wednesday afternoon, at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

Yet he insists that the soul of flamenco is not the guitar at all, but the voice. The rediscovery of the importance of song in the flamenco tradition has, he insists, played a major part in revitalising the tradition during the past three decades - and in helping to resist the sort of rampant commercialisation associated with the huge rise in popularity of world music. "It is the song, really, that moves and inspires and tells," he says.

Peña himself has been hailed as an artist who embodies both tradition and innovation; which means that he, in turn, resists attempts to prevent flamenco from developing in an organic way. "The art is very alive - it's alive and pushing forward," he says. "The fact is that flamenco has now become absolutely precise rhythmically, complex rhythmically. Flamenco rhythms always were complex; but the timing and development of precision in these rhythms is ever more subtle and interesting. That is a new development in my lifetime. And not only the rhythms, but the harmonies of the guitar, the complexity of dance steps."

Such developments, he stresses, have come along with TV and the Internet and the easy access to other cultures which now pertains in Andalucia just as much as everywhere else. "Dancers are drawing from observing what goes on in - say - contemporary dance. Sometimes they make mistakes and do crazy things; but sometimes they enrich the repertoire in new and wonderful ways." But whatever changes take place in flamenco, there'll always be guitar. Didn't he say somewhere that in flamenco, the guitar is the fabric on which the singers and dancers weave their art?

"It's a wonderful quote, isn't it?" he says, beaming. "But I took it from somebody. He's dead now. It comes from a book he wrote. For me as a guitarist,what is important when you're doing flamenco is that you, personally, are responsible. Say your dancer is dancing; you have to understand what the dancer is doing, and not only that, but what he or she is going to do. You've got to feel that, and add excitement to it. Contribute to the performance by surprising them or exhilarating them."

And, needless to say, the audience.

• The Walton's Guitar Festival of Ireland runs from tomorrow to Sunday, with performances by top international guitarists including Steve Kaufman, Manuel Barreuco, John Feeley, Xuefei Yang and Clive Carroll, and a Guitar Traditions Workshop with John Williams. Paco Peña and Friends will perform at Vicar Street on Friday. See www.guitarfestivalofireland.com