Musician Manu Chao will return to Portugal for an acoustic concert at the Contrasta Festival in Valença on 13 July, the organization announced today.
The 62-year-old artist returns to Portugal and, in particular, to the north, where he has performed several times, most notably at the Vilar de Mouros festival in 2002.
Born in Paris to an exiled Spanish family, Manu Chao adopts several languages in his artistic work, which has had a marked political component since the days of the band Mano Negra.
His rise to fame came with the 1998 album “Clandestino”, on which he sang: “Alone I go with my sentence, alone goes my condemnation / Running is my destiny to evade the law / Lost in the heart of the great Babylon / They tell me ‘the clandestine’ because I don’t have papers”.
In 2020, in an article entitled “Manu Chao: chronicle of the star who turned his back on the system”, the Spanish newspaper El País wrote that “surely there hasn’t been a musician in recent years like him, capable of turning his back on the system when he could get so much out of it”.
The third edition of the Contrasta Festival takes place at the Cortinas de São Francisco, in the Valença Fortress, on July 12 and 13 and tickets are already on sale, with passes costing 20 euros.
