Valencia hosts star-studded Los40 Music Awards with Rosalía, Ed Sheeran headlining

Valencia filled the Roig Arena with twelve thousand people on a November evening, and for once, Spain's music industry had decentralized itself away from Madrid and Barcelona. The Los40 Music Awards Santander 2025 arrived in the city with the kind of gravitational pull that makes tickets vanish in minutes—a phenomenon born partly from scarcity, partly from the lineup itself. Rosalía was coming. Ed Sheeran was coming. Aitana was coming. For anyone who grew up in the periphery of Spain's two dominant cities, an event of this scale had always felt like someone else's privilege. Now it was here.

The anticipation began before the doors opened. Hundreds of teenagers crowded the entrance, waiting for glimpses of their favorite artists. Aitana, Ed Sheeran, Emilia, and the Italian influencer Chiara Ferragni moved through the crowd exchanging selfies and autographs. Inside, the stage was already set for the evening's centerpiece—a platform decorated with crosses, an orchestra seated and ready since seven-thirty, waiting to accompany Rosalía's performance of 'Reliquia.' Everything else that happened that night would exist in the shadow of what was coming.

Ed Sheeran arrived with the weight of numbers behind him: nearly fifty million social media followers, ninety-five million monthly listeners on Spotify, and a new album called 'Play'—his eighth studio record. He performed 'Azizam' and 'Sapphire,' songs built on the foundation of his acoustic guitar, but it was 'Perfect' that moved the crowd, especially when Aitana joined him onstage to sing the song that had carried her to international recognition. Between the headliners, other artists filled the space with their own moments. Nil Moliner performed a Raimon song, 'Al meu país la pluja no sap ploure,' as a remembrance of the 2024 dana—the catastrophic flooding that had devastated the region months earlier. The gesture was deliberate, a reminder that even in celebration, the city carried its recent grief.

When Rosalía took the stage, she received the Global Icon award and used the moment to address that grief directly. 'You have all my love,' she said to the victims and those affected by the flooding. Aitana echoed the sentiment later in the evening. These were not throwaway remarks; they were the event's moral center, a recognition that Valencia's emergence as a major music venue was inseparable from the city's recent trauma and recovery.

Aitana closed the night with her own performance, moving through 'Cuando hables con él,' '6 de febrero,' and 'Superestrella' in a crescendo that brought the crowd to its feet. She had won the award for best tour, and her two upcoming concerts at the same arena—scheduled for May—had sold out the moment tickets went on sale. The momentum was real and measurable.

The evening distributed other awards across the landscape of contemporary Spanish and Latin music. Bad Bunny took best urban album for 'Debí tirar más fotos.' Ed Sheeran won best international album. Aitana's tour was recognized. Emilia, Mora, and Rels B received recognition in their respective categories. The red carpet had stretched for four hours, with more than a hundred artists and content creators passing through a photocall inside the arena—so long that some guests missed Rosalía's eight o'clock performance entirely. Belén Esteban and María Patiño, the television personalities known for their willingness to speak plainly, delivered awards without scripts. Anabel Pantoja, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Ana Peleteiro handed out others.

What mattered most was not the awards themselves but the fact that they were happening here, in Valencia, not in the cities that had always claimed Spain's cultural machinery. The Los40 Music Awards had positioned itself as a reference point in European music—comparable to the Brit Awards in England or the Victoire de la Musique in France. For a city rebuilding after disaster, hosting an event of this scale and star power was not merely entertainment. It was a statement about recovery, about the capacity to gather and celebrate even after loss, about the possibility of becoming something more than a regional afterthought.