PETRONIO ÁLVAREZ FESTIVAL 2025

A festival that celebrates the cultural heritage of the Colombian Pacific

The Petronio Álvarez Pacific Music Festival, held every year in Cali, is one of Colombia’s most important cultural gatherings and the leading showcase of the Pacific region’s musical traditions. Conceived as a space to highlight and preserve Afro-Colombian roots, the event brings together ensembles, composers and performers who compete in traditional categories such as marimba, chirimía or Cauca violins, always evaluated by a specialised jury.

The 29th edition took place from August 13 to 18, 2025 at the Alberto Galindo Sports Complex, known as Ciudadela Petronio. For six days, the city of Cali became the epicentre of Pacific culture, with more than 2,000 artists performing and an audience of over 800,000 people. The festival was consolidated not only as a musical event, but also as a comprehensive showcase of the region’s cultural identity.

For this edition, Stage Entertainment and Dussan Iluminaciones were in charge of the technical production, with ARA systems delivering clear and powerful sound for the artists, the jury and the audience.

A demanding urban setting and an unprecedented musical diversity

The 29th edition of the Petronio Álvarez Festival was held at the Alberto Galindo Sports Complex, located in a densely populated area of Cali and surrounded by several residential units. This location posed an obvious challenge: to ensure a high-quality sound experience for thousands of attendees without disturbing the neighbours, in a context where environmental authorities even carried out continuous noise measurements to guarantee compliance with permitted levels.

Added to this was the need to provide even coverage in a large and busy open-air venue, where the audience was spread across different areas up to more than 70 metres from the stage. The system had to maintain consistency across the entire frequency range, avoiding drops in sound pressure or loss of definition at distant points.

The festival is also characterised by the great diversity of genres that converge on its stages, from symphony orchestras to traditional Pacific ensembles, along with urban acts and salsa. This variety required precise frequency response, capable of adapting to very different musical styles without losing clarity or colour.

In short, the challenge was to deliver powerful and balanced sound, while respecting environmental regulations and ensuring that both the public and the artists could enjoy the experience without generating conflicts with the immediate urban surroundings.

A precise sound design with ARA systems

To meet the challenges posed by the urban environment and the scale of the festival, a complete configuration based on ARA systems was implemented. The main PA consisted of 36 LARA-80 units, arranged in two L/R arrays of 18 systems each, providing the primary coverage for the venue. An additional 8 LARA-80 units were deployed as outfill to reinforce one of the side areas, along with 16 LARA-80 as delays to ensure consistency in the most distant zones.

At the front, 6 LARA-100 were used as frontfills, ensuring clarity in the first rows. Low frequencies were managed with 44 LARA-SUB units: 28 arranged in an electronic arc across the front of the stage and 8 per side in end fire configuration, delivering the necessary power to cover the festival’s large-scale requirements.

One of the most notable aspects of the project was that all systems are cardioid, which allowed for very stable control of sound dispersion and significantly reduced the impact on surrounding residential areas. FOH engineer Juan Murillo emphasised this point: “Here we face a very marked problem, which is that we have neighbours. It was very important to find a solution that would not affect them so much”.

The system’s ability to maintain consistency across the entire frequency range also proved essential given the wide musical diversity of the Petronio. As Murillo pointed out: “More than ten engineers have worked here; we’ve had symphony orchestras, urban acts, traditional groups, salsa and many other formats, and it is definitely a brand and an option that will influence my riders”.

“The system has performed in an incredible way”

The success of the deployment with ARA systems was reflected not only in the quality perceived by the audience, but also in the satisfaction of the technical teams and the festival’s own jury. Juan Camilo Fernández, system tech at Stage Entertainment, summarised the experience: “The system has dynamics, strength, headroom, power, it is defined, and the truth is, the challenge was very big but the system has performed in an incredible way. We are really very happy with the system”.

The impact was equally evident in the development of the musical competition. Claudia Patricia Prado Lemos, from the jury coordination team, noted: “The sound this year has been very good, it has improved greatly and has allowed both the jury and the coordination team to better evaluate the groups. It was important that they could be ideally heard in their performances. We were able to assess all the effort, the work and the musical preparation they had put in. Listening to each instrument, each nuance of every instrument, the bass lines, the compositions they made in their songs, the lyrics and the vocal interpretation”.