The 62-year-old artist returns to Portugal to the North, where he has visited several times, most notably the Vilar de Mouros festival in 2002.

Born in Paris into an exiled Spanish family, Manu Chao adopts several languages in his artistic work, which has a marked political component, since the days of the band Mano Negra.

His rise to fame came with the album “Clandestino”, from 1998, in which he sang, in free translation: “Alone I go with my pen, alone goes my condemnation / Running is my destiny to avoid the law / Lost in the heart of the great Babylon / They call me 'the clandestine' for not having papers.”


In 2020, in a text titled “Manu Chao: chronicle of the star who turned his back on the system”, the Spanish newspaper El País wrote that “there is certainly no musician in recent years like him, capable of turning his back on the system when he could take so many things about him.”

The third edition of the Contrasta Festival takes place in Cortinas de São Francisco, in Fortaleza de Valença, on the 12th and 13th of July and tickets are now on sale, with passes costing 20 euros.