Shakira turns Madrid into a profitable theatre of reinvention

Madrid has rarely looked so eager to be a backdrop. For four consecutive weekends, Shakira has turned the Spanish capital into the only European stop of her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour, with 12 shows, more than 600,000 tickets and a temporary stadium in the south of the city designed for about 55,000 people a night. The numbers are large enough to impress even the most hardened sceptic, which is useful because the spectacle itself makes no attempt at understatement.

Around the stage, she has built Macondo Park, a small city of its own with food, music, literature, children’s areas, exhibitions and a second stage. The idea is not simply to sell tickets, but to sell an atmosphere. Shakira has framed the choice of Madrid as deliberate: a city with a large Latin American community, where Latin culture is already part of everyday life rather than a decorative import. That may be the most sensible part of the whole enterprise.

The show opens with a clear message. There are girls, mothers and grandmothers in the crowd; Colombians, Venezuelans, Peruvians and Spaniards, but also Germans, Dutch and Danes. Some arrive in purple wigs, others in coin skirts, many in glitter. By the time the music starts, they are all folded into the same tribe. Shakira leans into that sense of collective release, moving from La fuerte to Girl Like Me, Las de la intuición and Estoy aquí, while a digital version of herself rebuilds its body from sand before the real one appears with her pack.

The references to her private life are not hidden away in some tasteful drawer. They are part of the product, and she knows it. Barcelona, where she lived for more than a decade, where she raised her children with Gerard Piqué and left after a painful separation, hovers over the Madrid residency as the obvious shadow behind the lights. Her return to Spain, but not to Barcelona, gives the whole run a sharper edge. She seems to enjoy that. So does the audience.

The concert is built around a simple premise: falling does not mean staying down. That idea is repeated in song after song, from La tortura and Te felicito to TQG, Hips Don’t Lie and Waka Waka. A line from Isabel Allende appears on the screens, saying that women alone are vulnerable, but together they are invincible. It is a neat slogan, perhaps too neat, but no one in the stadium seems to mind. Mothers dance with daughters, friends embrace, strangers sing in unison. The performance trades in solidarity, sensuality and self-assertion with the efficiency of a well-run brand.

And then there is the business, which is never far away even when the choreography is pretending otherwise. The residency is expected to generate between €150 million and €200 million in direct associated spending for Madrid. That is not a cultural footnote. It is the point. Instead of touring Europe in the usual way, Shakira has made fans travel to her. For a city that likes to present itself as a hub, this is a tidy arrangement: the artist gets the myth, the city gets the money.

Near the end, the screens display the ten commandments of the she-wolves, a code of independence, freedom and sisterhood, with a few pointed jokes aimed at her past. The crowd catches them instantly. The same happens when she saves the Bizarrap session for the finale, the song that turned her breakup into one of her biggest hits. By then, the whole evening has completed its circle. Shakira left Spain in tears. She has come back to Madrid cashing in, and doing so with enough confidence to make the transaction look like liberation.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com