A Juanes mega fan’s reaction to seeing him in the car next to hers goes viral
One Juanes mega fan got the surprise of a lifetime after one of his shows.
After performing at The Criterion in Oklahoma City on Oct. 26, the Colombian superstar shared a video on his Instagram showing him in the backseat of a car and pulling up next to a fan belting out one of his songs.
The text on the singer’s video reads in Spanish, “I was leaving my concert and I saw this girl singing ‘Es Por Ti’ in her car and I decided to get close and sing with her.”
At a stoplight, Juanes rolls down his window and continues singing with the fan. At first, she doesn’t appear to notice who it is and continues singing. When she realizes it’s Juanes, she immediately screams, jumps out of the vehicle and takes a photo with him.
“Ah, Juanes, I can’t believe it!!” she keeps saying in the clip.
The Grammy winner captioned his video, “We were leaving our show in Oklahoma City yesterday and this happened. Thank you to all my fans!!! I LOVE THEM.”
María Camila Zarta, 28, the fan who was passionately singing “Es Por Ti,” tells TODAY.com in Spanish that she was “in shock” and “thought I was dreaming.”
“I was singing at full volume,” Zarta says. “I saw a person and my brain was just processing those seconds of, ‘Who is this person?’ My goodness, I was in shock! I couldn’t believe it! I thought I was dreaming. I couldn’t believe who I was seeing. Out of all the people on the road, how could I run into Juanes?”
Zarta says she has been a fan of Juanes since she was a little girl, singing his songs in front of the mirror and putting posters of him on her walls in her home in Colombia. This was her first time seeing the Latin superstar in concert.
“Es Por Ti” is her favorite Juanes song and she dedicated it to her fiancé, David Conde, who bought her the concert tickets and was in the car with her. Both from Colombia, they say that few Latin artists have concerts in Oklahoma City, where they currently reside, and were excited to see him perform.
“Since we were at the concert, she was trying to find a way to get close to (Juanes), get on the stage,” Conde also tells TODAY.com in Spanish, adding that it didn’t happen. They waited until traffic died down to leave the venue and had been singing his songs as they left.
When she realized it was Juanes in the other car, she attempted to record a video with him and posted it on TikTok. Conde also snapped a photo of Zarta and Juanes together, which is currently her profile pic.
Zarta says that a couple months ago, she fell into a deep depression where everything was “gray.” Referencing Juanes’ song “Gris,” which translates to gray, she says she sought help and believes that this was, in a way, a sign of her getting out of the darkness.
“When someone is happy, good things happen to them,” she says, with Conde adding that seeing Zarta filled with so much joy makes him happy.
Zarta says if she could tell Juanes one thing, it would be that the girl who hugged him wasn’t the 28-year-old girl she is now. “Instead, it was the 13-year-old girl who listened to his songs, had posters of him on her walls and sang his songs como una loca. That was the girl that hugged him.”
In the spring, Juanes completed roughly 30 concerts during the first leg of his U.S. tour for his Grammy-winning “Vida Cotidiana” album. The singer then decided to schedule a special second U.S. tour leg in the fall to visit a number of cities that he has either never or rarely performed in, including his Oklahoma City stop, as well as Kansas City, St. Louis, Fayetteville and more.
Zarta’s brief but memorable moment with Juanes following the concert, she says, was extra meaningful because of her roots.
“As an immigrant, you deeply miss your country. And for Juanes to have shared that moment with me, he gave me a piece of my homeland,” she says.
