Madrid, bichota territory. Karol G (Medellín, 33 years old) has the city at her feet. The Colombian singer has four full concerts at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, a venue with capacity for 65,000 attendees. They will be on July 20, 21, 22 and 23, and during the four days 260,000 people will sing at the top of their lungs the songs of the artist’s current tour, Mañana será bonito, which began last year in the USA and ends in the capital of Spain. She will do so with a great concert that will be broadcast on her social media platforms. streaming as a way of saying goodbye to her fans. The artist has conquered the city before arriving.
“Madrid will manage to earn 72.2 million euros for the four nights,” says the professor of economics at the OBS Business School and director of Eurocofín, Carlos Balado, after studying the economic impact that similar Karol G concerts have had in other cities around the world. “The expenditure per person is 278 euros on average, taking into account that the average ticket price is 80 euros plus accommodation, transport and food for each attendee,” says Balado, who sees these figures as events that have a significant impact on the economy of the place. The success of Karol G’s attendance has many reasons, but the weight of the 568,034 Colombians registered in Spain and the million migrants in Europe is undeniable.
The week before tickets for the concerts went on sale, searches for flights to Madrid increased by 187%, explains Balado. At first, the singer only had one date in the capital, but when they saw that there were no tickets left in the first hour of the concert pre-sale, the producers decided to add more dates. Last week, Karol G, at her concert in Lisbon, Portugal, surprised by the number of Spanish flags, asked her fans how many more concerts they should have done in Spain if she already had four dates and, from what she saw, that wasn’t enough.
On December 13, at 8:53 a.m., in a WhatsApp group called Las Bichotas, five Colombian friends were waiting impatiently to log on to the Ticketmaster platform and buy tickets for their favorite artist. The pre-sale, which started at 10:00, announced at that moment that they were already in the queue. At 10:01, Daniela Martínez already had 71,000 people ahead of her. “We were suffering. We didn’t know if we were going to make it,” recalls Martínez, who felt the pressure from all her friends. At 10:59, when the platform finally gave her the opportunity to choose the tickets, there were no more. They decided to give up their dream of seeing Karol G together. Paloma Acosta, 26, one of the five friends, decided to buy flights to Zurich, Switzerland, and see her there; Laura Romero, 34, bought tickets to Brussels and enjoyed the Bichota concert in Belgium, and the other three decided to wait for a miracle. It came: they have managed to get tickets to go see her in Madrid this weekend.
María Ramírez, 29, plans to go see her on July 20, Colombia’s independence day, at the Bernabéu. “Seeing Karol G means many things at this moment in my life. Her songs have helped me heal my heart in one of the most challenging moments. She has given me hope that everything will be beautiful tomorrow,” sums up the Colombian, who is very proud to see how a Colombian has managed to conquer Spain like few artists have done. “Before, being Colombian was something to hide because of drug trafficking, but now it makes me proud,” she says.
Full concerts at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium Karol G’s concert will set a record for the number of tickets sold by a singer in Spain on consecutive days. With 240,000 tickets, it surpasses Coldplay’s 225,000 in 2023 at the Olympic Stadium in Montjuïc.
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Music manager Pedro Malaver, who has closely studied the community of fans that the artist has managed to create in recent years, says that what is happening with Karol G is undoubtedly historic. “Filling a stadium for any artist is an achievement. Filling it four times in a row in July is unimaginable,” he says.
“People want to believe that Karol G is a Latin phenomenon, but she represents much more than that. The concept of being a bichota, of overcoming oneself and of showing oneself as one is has created a leader and a place where many women can reflect. That has made her community connect with her,” she says.
Karol G commented during her tour in Europe that she had read several comments on social media that claimed that she was only able to sell out her concerts because her audience is full of Latinos. She replied without hesitation: “Are Latinos not people or what? My Latino community has me traveling around the world, fulfilling dreams.”
The singer also has all her fans traveling by air, sea and land to see her. “It is expected that this musical event will be attended not only by people from Spain, but from all over Europe and even the world. Coinciding with these dates, BlaBlaCarthe ride-sharing platform, expects to register more than 21,000 trips to the Community of Madrid,” the company itself assures.
“The platform has seen a 10% increase in the number of trips compared to last week. The main places of origin are Valencia, Murcia, Granada, Alicante and Malaga. The average price of these trips is 21 euros and the average distance travelled is 391 kilometres,” reads the statement, which states that Karol G’s arrival is expected to have a similar economic impact to that of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the city. In fact, when the Colombian performed in her native country, she contributed more than 70 billion pesos (16 million euros) to the economic well-being of Bogotá and is estimated to have generated around 7,000 direct jobs. In addition, train journeys from Seville have increased by 16% and from cities such as Barcelona and Valencia by 18%,” according to data from the Trainline platform.
The nightlife entrepreneur and manager Edgar Candel Kerri assures that this is a historic event: “There are people from all over the world traveling to Madrid to see her because Karol is pure passion and emotion,” he says. For Kerri, the month of July in Madrid was always bad for hoteliers, but now, with the Latin migration, this has changed. María Asensio, 30, remembers that Karol G conquered all the clubs in Madrid in 2020 with her song Tusa, a concept that resembles what in Spain would be the mal de amores, but in Colombia it is a cultural phenomenon that has become international thanks to the song homonym of Karol G and Nicky Minaj“I was able to get over my ex-partner thanks to her songs, and now I can’t wait to sing them this Saturday at the Bernabéu. It will be therapeutic,” she says. The horde of bichotas is getting closer to Madrid every day.
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