Shakira is ready to make history in Brazil and deliver one of the most important concerts of her successful career. The Colombian superstar will take the stage on Saturday (May 2) at the iconic Copacabana Beach as the headliner of Todo Mundo No Rio, the massive free event that attracts millions of people to Rio de Janeiro, where icons like Madonna and Lady Gaga have performed in the past.
In an emotional open letter published this week by the Brazilian newspaper O Globo — and shared with Billboard in English by her representatives on Wednesday (April 29) — Shakira spoke about what promises to be a historic performance at the iconic Brazilian beach. In the letter, the 49-year-old artist reflected on how her monumental Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour has its roots in one of the hardest moments of her life: “A day when everything I had built collapsed all at once,” she wrote, referring to her separation from her former partner.
The “Hips Don’t Lie” singer shared that she spent months wrestling with a question: Why her, why Rio, why now? The answer, she wrote, came to her one morning when she woke up to a life she no longer recognized. “I woke up as a different woman living a different life,” she recalled. “And the next day, I still had to get up, make breakfast, take the kids to school, answer the phone, keep a career going. Life doesn’t give women a break when they suddenly find themselves alone, carrying everything.”
Shakira said that from that moment, she had to completely reinvent herself — as a mother, provider, artist and woman — and that this period of growth became the backbone of her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran era. “It’s not a cry for revenge, nor a flag of victimhood,” she asserted. “It’s exactly the opposite: it’s the calm acknowledgment that crying is no longer enough, that there are children to support, bills to pay, lives to push forward. And it can be done, and it can be done with dignity.”
During her journey around the world, Shakira said she saw her story mirrored in the faces of other women who waited for her after her concerts to share their own versions of the same story in just two minutes. “Women who were alone but not defeated,” noted the Barranquilla native. “And I understood that what I thought was a deeply personal experience was actually the shared biography of an entire generation of Latinas.”
She pointed out that for decades, the image of the Latina woman was stigmatized as “devoted to the home, quiet, secondary. That image is outdated. Today’s Latina has decided to move forward and become the provider of everything. She is the sole provider, makes decisions, leads, builds projects, raises children on her own if she has to.”
Shakira said this understanding deepened when she arrived in Brazil and learned that 20 million single mothers are raising their families practically alone. “Wow, I’m one of them,” she thought.
She also described Rio as a place where nature itself reminds people of what truly matters: the ocean, the moon, the drums on every corner, the feeling that life is meant to be danced — “Because in that presence, there is love, there is happiness, there is the meaning of life. You don’t have to look for it anywhere else.”
The letter ends with an invitation for her fans to meet her “where the human tide blends with the tide of the sea.”
Shakira’s megaconcert in Copacabana will only be broadcast in Brazil through the Globo network on its television platform and its app, Globo Play. The show will follow her historic free concert at Mexico City’s Zócalo on March 1, where she broke records by gathering 400,000 people.
The Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran tour, which began on February 11, 2025, and continues with dates throughout this year, officially set a Guinness World Record as the highest-grossing tour of all time by a Hispanic artist. The historic tour grossed an astonishing $421.6 million and sold 3.3 million tickets across 86 shows, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
The final stop of the trek will be in Spain, with an 11-show residency scheduled between September and October in Madrid.
This story originally appeared on Billboard
