Denied the license to celebrate the Puro Reggaeton Festival in Madrid in less than 24 hours and with 35,000 tickets sold | Culture

Daddy Yankee is in Madrid, but will not perform at the Puro Reggaeton Festival, which was due to take place on Friday July 15 and Saturday July 16 at the capital’s Wanda Metropolitano stadium. Only a last-minute miracle would allow hits like Gasoline. The Community of Madrid refused the license less than 24 hours before the start of the big reggaeton event of the summer because the documentation was delivered after the deadline. 37,000 tickets are sold per day. Besides Yankee, Bad Gyal, Omar Montes, Morad, Gente de Zona, Eladio Carrión, Natti Natasha or Juan Magán are announced. Tomorrow morning there is a meeting during which the organizers “have the hope” that the situation can be unblocked.

The appointment was originally scheduled for La Caja Mágica, but yesterday the change of location to the rojiblanco stadium was announced. The story of this hasty transfer has a code name: Daddy Yankee. We have to go back to before the pandemic, when the festival was announced for 2020 with Bad Bunny and Yankee as the main claim. As has happened to all cultural events around the world, this festival had to reorganize to see if it could keep its stars for 2022 and keep the 18,000 people who had bought tickets. Bunny is not filming in 2022, so that was ruled out. The option was to keep Yankee (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 45). The organization got it with a great motivation: it would be the Puerto Rican’s last tour since he had announced his retirement a few weeks earlier. With the slogan “this is the last chance we have to see it”, the number of tickets sold rose to 37,000. “That was in April. And there we already realized that maybe La Caja Mágica was not prepared to accommodate so many people. 18,000 yes, but 37,000 no. Then came various events at La Caja Mágica and until June we could not see on the ground if this place was able to host the festival. And we realized that was not the case”, explains Ibai Cereijo, spokesperson for the Puro Reggaeton Festival.

Three weeks ago and still according to the organizers, the transfer to the Wanda Metropolitano, a football field which has hosted music concerts for several years, had already been decided. This 2022, for example, those of the Rolling Stones, Alejandro Sanz or Vetusta Morla, all with more than 35,000 spectators. “We only announced the change yesterday because we didn’t want to be arrogant and push ahead with the permits. Whereas yesterday there were only fringes missing, we decided to announce it, because we were 48 hours from the start”, says Cereijo. And he adds: “Yes, I recognize that we delivered the documentation on the security and emergency plans after the deadline, but we trusted the will of the Community to overcome this inconvenience”.

“If the deadlines were exceeded by the promoter, it is because the Administration requested more and more documentation, and the festival team needed time to satisfy the requests”, explains the festival. Behind this musical event hide the organizers of musical events such as Dreambeach, Weekendbeach or Puro Latino. “Our safety record is clean,” they explain.

The Wanda stages had already been set and more than 100 national and international journalists were accredited to cover it, when the promoters received the announcement “with surprise, amazement and helplessness”. They had paid the costs of organizing the event and already had a certificate of cultural interest from Madrid City Hall. “All the steps that the Administration has taken in its relationship with us have made it clear that the festival had the green light”, they explain. Now, however, and given the refusal of the license, they point to an “obvious lack of will on the part of the regional administration for this event to take place”.

Tomorrow Friday, the festival’s organizing company will present a new, expanded and improved security plan with the hope that the appointment will be authorized on the edge.