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Spanish Pop and Alejandro Sanz: The Voice of Latin America (1990–today)

There is something about Spanish pop from the nineties that no market analysis can fully explain: its ability to conquer Latin America with a depth and permanence that is unprecedented in the history of Spanish-language music. Spanish singers were not the first to make pop in Spanish — Argentinians, Mexicans, and Colombians had been doing it for decades — but something in Alejandro Sanz's voice, in Enrique Iglesias's proposal, in the pop of Malú and Rosario, resonated south of the Atlantic with the intensity of recognition: this is what we were waiting for.

7 min read published 27/05/2026 6 reads by DoReSol

Spanish Pop and Alejandro Sanz: The Voice of Latin America (1990–today)

The most honest explanation is the simplest: the songs were good. But there was also something more: Spanish pop of the nineties arrived at the exact moment when Latin America needed an alternative to reggaeton that did not yet exist and to American pop in English that had never quite fully belonged.

Alejandro Sanz: Flamenco turned into universal pop

Alejandro Sánchez PizarroAlejandro Sanz — was born in Madrid on December 18, 1968, to Andalusian parents. He began playing the guitar at the age of seven, influenced by his family's flamenco roots during summers in Andalusia. That origin — the Madrid boy who learned flamenco at his grandparents' house during the summer — explains everything that would come later.

His commercial debut came with Viviendo Deprisa (1991), but it was Más (1997) the album that made him the best-selling Spanish artist of his generation: an album that mixed pop ballads with flamenco sensitivity with a naturalness that only someone who had grown up between the two worlds could achieve.

"Corazón Partío"Listen — was the central hit of that album and one of the greatest songs in Spanish music: heartbreak described with images that took from flamenco its ability to name physical pain without euphemisms, but with a perfectly contemporary pop radio production. From a search in his roots — Italian pop and, above all, flamenco — was born the song that would establish him.

Alejandro Sanz has won 24 Latin Grammy Awards and 4 Grammy Awards. He has received the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year three times. The singer is notable for his flamenco-influenced ballads, and he has also experimented with various other genres including pop, rock, funk, R&B, and jazz.

The Generation of the Latin Grammy

The birth of the Latin Grammy in 2000 was the institutional signal that Spanish pop had reached a level of production and global reach that deserved its own recognition infrastructure.

Alejandro Sanz was the first big winner of those awards — and also the one who has won them the most times. But his generation included other names that defined Spanish pop of the period: Enrique Iglesias — son of Julio — who built a global career operating simultaneously in English and Spanish; David Bisbal — from Almería, the winner of Operación Triunfo 2002 who demonstrated that television could produce artists with real careers — ; and Malú — niece of Paco de Lucía, who inherited her family's flamenco sensitivity and turned it into a pop career of extraordinary consistency.

Operación Triunfo: the pop laboratory

The program Operación Triunfo — the singing talent show that TVE first aired in 2001 — was the most important television phenomenon in the history of Spanish pop. Not only because of the artists it launched David Bisbal, David Bustamante, Rosa López — but because of what it demonstrated about the Spanish public's relationship with music: that there was a massive appetite for pop in Spanish that the industry had not fully satisfied.

Operación Triunfo was criticized for being a factory of artists built for the market. That criticism was partly fair and partly irrelevant: what mattered was that the artists who survived — Bisbal above all — built careers of a depth that mediocre factories cannot produce. Bisbal still lives off songs that the public learned in 2002 and continues to sing with the same intensity twenty years later.

Rosalía: the flamenco of the 21st century

And then, in 2018, Rosalía arrived.

Rosalía Vila Tobella — born in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, Barcelona, in 1992 — studied flamenco at l'Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya with the singer José Miguel Évora, and from that learning, she built something that did not exist: a synthesis of flamenco, R&B, electronic music, and contemporary production that was at the same time completely faithful to the essence of cante jondo and completely original in its form.

El Mal Querer (2018) — her second album, co-produced with the Barcelona producer El Guincho — was the most important artistic object of Spanish music of the 21st century. The album is presented as experimental and conceptual; a work that links the characteristic melodrama of flamenco with the narrative of modern R&B. The album follows the anonymous 13th-century Occitan novel Flamenca — the story of a woman locked up by her jealous husband — and turns it into a conceptual album that mixes flamenco claps with the roar of motorcycles, cante jondo melismas with vocoders, bulería rhythms with trap production.

The mix was absolutely seemingly impossible and absolutely natural in its result. Rosalía won the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year in 2019, becoming the first solo female artist to win the top honor since Shakira thirteen years earlier.

Since then, Rosalía has continued to expand her sonic universe: MOTOMAMI (2022) took experimentation even further, mixing flamenco with Dominican dembow, reggaeton, bossa nova, and avant-garde music, and won the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year and the Anglo-Saxon Grammy for Best Urban Music Album.

C. Tangana: Madrid and the Arab World

In the same generation as Rosalía, but from a different perspective, Antón Álvarez AlfaroC. Tangana — built one of the most original artistic projects in recent Spanish pop.

His album El Madrileño (2021) — a collection of songs that mixed Madrid pop with Arab music, flamenco, Spanish copla, and reggaeton — was the equivalent for Spanish urban pop of what El Mal Querer had been for contemporary flamenco: the demonstration that Spanish popular music could absorb the world without losing its identity.

Editorial note: Rosalía studied flamenco at the conservatory in Barcelona, a city that is not Andalusia and where flamenco is, technically, imported music. And she produced the most important flamenco album since Camarón. That paradox — the most original flamenco of the 21st century made by a Catalan trained in a conservatory — is the definitive answer to all debates about authenticity in popular music. The authentic is not what comes from the place of origin: it is what comes from deep knowledge and total freedom. Rosalía knew more about flamenco than many singers who had grown up in Triana. And she used it to do something that Triana had not done. That is also tradition.

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