It took 77 years for Joan Manuel Serrat to make the decision to retire from the stage. But his decision was driven by the facts, he says. First was Joaquín Sabina’s fall at a concert in February 2020, which forced them to cancel the tour. And afterwards, the pandemic. The tour will begin in April next year in New York and Miami and will end in Barcelona at the end of the year, just before Christmas.

Tickets for the two concerts in the United States are already on sale on the artist’s website. The tour will put the finishing touch on a 56-year career in which there have been dozens of hits amass millions of fans around the world.

”I have decided to say goodbye in person. I did not like feeling fired by a plague,” he said in an interview with newspaper El País, where he announced his retirement.

The plague is the coronavirus, obviously, and the subsequent lockdown, which revealed to him that a return to family life is what he wants to continue doing. The farewell will be in style because Serrat wants to do it “with the audience in front, full of gratitude and joy.”

He considers himself a lucky guy and he described his happiness with a sentence that could well be part of one of his songs: “My children didn’t go to war and I was able to see my parents die.”

If anything comes to mind after pronouncing his name, it is the Mediterranean Sea. His songs are linked to a sailor, the happy and ironic characterhe endeared to his millions of fans around the world. Poetry in Spanish also owes him a lot.

His voice has taken Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández and Mario Benedetti to every corner of the world. Serrat’s music is a continuous tribute to family life inside and outside of each home. A childhood that continues to play on the beach, a popular party with green, red and yellow paper flags and, to sum up, “those little things” that make us cry when no one sees.

Serrat’s story began in the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, where he was born. His songs always seek to honor courage and simplicity. His family was humble and from his mother’s side, they retaliated during the Spanish postwar period for having supported the Republic, the first democratic period in the country's history. Her boyfriend died before her wedding and when she emigrated to Barcelona to work, the civil war broke out.

Her parents were murdered in her town, Belchite, during the postwar shortage. That story marked the voice of one of the greatest geniuses of Spanish music. In his youth, he opposed the Franco regime and his face accompanied the first steps of Spanish democracy. But his commitment wasn't to remain in Spain: he also supported the struggles against dictatorships in Latin America.

His legacy is not only his music, but also an example of integrity and life that is already eternal.