Tens of thousands descend on the Petronio Álvarez Festival’s main stage to see major acts and a four-category battle of the bands. They bounce for hours to the Pacific coast’s infectious rhythms, waving traditional kerchiefs in the air. The festival attracts fans of all ages and is growing rapidly.
This article is adapted from AQ’s special report on trends to watch in Latin America in 2025
In recent decades, more than 600,000 Afro-Colombians have migrated to Cali, some of them fleeing the country’s internal armed conflict and drug war. The city is now home to Latin America’s second-largest Black population after Salvador, in Bahia, Brazil—and one of the hemisphere’s most vibrant musical scenes.
Every year, the Petronio Álvarez Festival takes to the streets to celebrate Afro-Colombian traditions. The gathering, which marked its 28th anniversary in August, is named after a Colombian musician who immortalized life and customs in Valle del Cauca through his music. It is a raucous, free five-day event that revels in rhythms like brass-band chirimía and currulao, the only Black music featuring marimba in the Americas, as well as new fusions of rap and pop.
The festival takes place in a city still healing from the COVID-19 pandemic and its social wounds. In 2021, when the government pushed an unpopular tax reform during the height of the pandemic, Cali and Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, became the main poles of national protests amid growing public discontent. That year, Amnesty International labeled Cali the “epicenter of repression” as over 2,000 protestors were detained, hundreds were injured, and more than 40 were killed, according to two independent monitoring groups. The deaths are now memorialized on a vast mural stretching across La Quinta, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The protestors’ faces fill huge letters spelling Memoria Viva (“Living Memory”).
In August, the event drew an estimated half-million people to Cali. Even Prince Harry and Meghan Markle—speaking in Spanish—took the stage with the nation’s first Afro-Colombian vice president, Francia Márquez, to join the celebration.
The festival’s main entrance greets visitors with an arch representing the Pacific coast’s nature and culture. The festival also features halls with dozens of local food, drink and craft vendors. All vendors are chosen by a jury and pay no fee to participate.
The 2024 Petronio Álvarez Festival opened with an ensemble of aging marimba and percussion maestros from Colombia’s Pacific coast playing alongside young relatives, a sort of Colombian version of Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club. Hugo Candelario, left, played the festival’s first year, 1997, with his band Grupo Bahía.
The night’s oldest marimba maestro, 87-year-old Genaro Torres, right, rehearses before taking the stage. Candelario said the lack of music schools and other resources on Colombia’s Pacific coast creates the “danger that ancestral magic and wisdom will go to the grave” with older marimba players like Torres.
Duchess Meghan Markle and Prince Harry join Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez and her husband, Yerney Pinillo, on stage. Márquez, a longtime rights activist and winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, invited Harry and Meghan to Colombia and hosted their visit. “It’s quite important that the Duke and Duchess came here,” Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder said, citing Colombia’s reputation for crime. “We need the world to start looking at us in a different way.” (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Archiewell Foundation via Getty.)
Viche, a traditional sugarcane liquor, was considered an illegal moonshine for hundreds of years until a 2021 federal law legalized it as part of Colombia’s cultural heritage. The law was intended to ensure that the production, distribution, and marketing of viche stayed in Afro-Colombian communities, but disputes have already arisen over white entrepreneurs buying and marketing the drink under their own labels.
Colombia’s Pacific coast, about as long as California’s, is home to many musical genres and other cultural expressions. These women wear T-shirts announcing their home city of Quibdó, capital of Chocó, a department known for brass-heavy chirimía music.
A mural depicts the coastal region’s sugarcane industry and its roots in slavery. “The sugar-growing valley needed Black blood … and now it needs peace and social justice,” it reads. The mass protests of 2021 and the election of Márquez in 2022 have helped create an environment where Black pride is more openly expressed. Two festival attendees (inset) wear T-shirts saying “I am Afro-Colombian” at one of the many smaller concerts held throughout Cali.
Beyond music, the 2024 festival featured 59 stands selling local seafood and other specialties and 43 stands dedicated to viche. Vendors have reported making $10,000 or more in sales during the festival, a windfall in a country where the monthly minimum wage is around $300.
After-hours shows can be found throughout Cali during the festival, immersing the city in Pacific coast rhythms. This show, called “Petronio Power,” took place in a cavernous club and lasted into the early morning hours. It featured Alexis Play, an artist from Quibdó who fuses traditional brass chirimía with electric guitar and rap. A projected image outside the venue (inset) advertises the show.
Nidia Góngora is one of the few musicians from the Pacific coast widely perceived to have “made it,” having recorded albums with European artists that have been streamed extensively on Spotify. She maintains firm contact with her roots, performing in last August’s festival with a group of older women in an homage to her mother, Olivia Bonilla Ángulo, who died in early 2024. Olivia’s portrait hangs in Góngora’s seafood restaurant in Cali, called Viche Positivo. She also founded a music school to pass down the region’s rhythms to new generations of performers.
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Jesse Pratt López is a freelance photographer born in Cali, Colombia, and based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Vogue and other publications.
Timothy Pratt is a bilingual journalist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Esquire and The Atlantic, as well as Colombia’s El Tiempo and El Espectador, among other outlets.
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