Huge scaffolding in a main stadium in San Juan, statements from its mayor hinting that the record label Rimas Entertainment had booked dates there and even some fans stationed to be the first to buy tickets… In recent weeks, the anticipation grew and this Monday it was confirmed: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, Bad Bunny, will close his DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS tour in his Puerto Rico.
“We close at home,” reads the announcement on Rimas’ Instagram account. There will be two concerts, on August 22 and 23, at the Hiram Bithorn stadium with a capacity of about 18,000 spectators, where since early August they began erecting part of what will be the stage for the performances with which Bad Bunny returns to the archipelago after the hugely successful residency “No me quiero ir de aquí,” with about thirty concerts that in 2025 generated more than 350 million for Puerto Rico’s economy.
He arrives after a journey that took him from last November from Santo Domingo and Buenos Aires, to Madrid and Brussels. Also after his performance at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California, which was a sort of love letter to everything his island represents to him and the resilience of the Puerto Ricans, and a veiled message of unity amid the deep polarization in the United States and the migratory offensive of President Donald Trump.
In fact, because it is an event in a state with a large Latino population, before that event there was fear that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would carry out migrant detention operations like those that were very visible at that time in several U.S. cities.
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The “little house” with its Puerto Rican revelry
Bad Bunny has not given any clue on his Instagram account about what he will do in these closing concerts. But he will possibly replicate the staging of what has been his tour, different from his residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico, an indoor venue where his “little house” and the revelry that formed there, like in any neighbor’s house on the island, became world famous. The Hiram Bithorn is more like the open-air venues where he performed in just over twenty cities around the world.
To all of them, the 32-year-old singer brought reggaeton, salsa, and dembow with La Mudanza, Callaíta, Baile inolvidable and Nueva Yol. At the Metropolitano stadium in Madrid, for example, the artist set up two stages, one with a gigantic screen at the back of the venue and another with the “little house” and its balcony as the focus. Likewise, Puerto Rican plena was a protagonist during the minutes when, together with Los Pleneros de la Cresta, he sang Café con Ron. “All of us here today are Puerto Ricans,” he said one night in Madrid. Probably this weekend in San Juan, verses like “in the mountain, today it breaks, from sunrise to sunset” will come even closer from his heart.
Although in recent days some people arrived at the Hiram Bithorn stadium trying to be the first to buy their tickets, Rimas announced that they will be sold in a limited way on a virtual platform.
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