The story
National Porro Festival in San Pelayo
National Porro Festival fills San Pelayo with nine straight nights of brass-band competition, from June 25th to July 3rd, celebrating porro, the Sinu River valley sound that never reached the global playlists cumbia did. Bands from across Colombia's Caribbean departments trade sets across multiple plazas while couples dance porro directly in the street rather than watching from a distance.
National Porro Festival gives San Pelayo nine straight nights each year, running from June 25th through July 3rd, to prove that porro, the brass-band sound born along the Sinu River, still belongs to the small Caribbean coast town that kept it alive rather than to the smoother, more commercial cumbia recordings that eclipsed it in wider circulation elsewhere in Colombia.