Alex Ubago

Vitoria, a demo and a cousin's errand

Alejandro Martínez de Ubago Rodríguez was born in Vitoria, in the Basque province of Álava, on 29 January 1981. He started putting songs together at fifteen and was writing in earnest by eighteen, eventually recording a rough demo that included Sabes and Hay que ver — two songs that would end up on his first album more or less intact.

The route from that demo to a record deal was domestic rather than industrial. In an interview with the Colombian daily El Tiempo in August 2026 he corrected the tidier version of the story: the recording had been made as a birthday present for his girlfriend, and it was his cousin Ramón who passed it to the manager Íñigo Argomaniz. Argomaniz took it seriously, and in October 2000 Ubago signed to the Madrid label DRO.

He was nineteen when the deal was done and twenty when the album came out, which matters for how the catalogue reads now: the songs that still anchor his set were written by a teenager in Vitoria with no professional context at all.

The record everything else is measured against

¿Qué pides tú? appeared in 2001 and sold roughly 1.5 million copies worldwide. Sin miedo a nada, a duet with Amaia Montero of La Oreja de Van Gogh, became the song most people can still name, and A gritos de esperanza and the title track followed it onto radio across Spain and Latin America. By April 2004 Ubago had been given a double diamond award for passing two million copies across his first two albums, with gold and platinum certifications in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Colombia.

The institutional recognition arrived quickly. He took the Premio Ondas for best national artist in 2002 and three Premios Amigo the same year, including best male artist and best newcomer. Fantasía o realidad followed in 2003 and produced Aunque no te pueda ver, the second song that reliably stops a room. The same year he recorded Sigo aquí, the Spanish-language theme for Disney's Treasure Planet, which pushed his voice into a much younger audience than his own records reached.

Eight albums and the work of staying put

The run after that is steady rather than dramatic: Aviones de cristal in 2006, Calle ilusión in 2009, Mentiras sinceras in 2012, Canciones impuntuales in 2017. Calle ilusión brought a Latin Grammy nomination for best male pop album in 2009. Across those years he worked outside his own catalogue too — a bilingual version of Walking Away with Craig David in 2008, Amarrado a ti with Sharon Corr in 2009, and the Álex, Jorge y Lena project with Jorge Villamizar and Lena Burke, whose Estar contigo in 2010 still turns up in his live set.

Later collaborations kept the ballad lineage going: a version of A gritos de esperanza with Jesús Navarro of Reik in 2021, and Ella vive en mí with Antonio Orozco in 2022. Television gave him a second kind of visibility, as a coach on La Voz Senior in Spain in 2020 and on La Voz Kids in Uruguay in 2023 — he spent a long stretch of that period living in Montevideo.

The most recent studio album, Galerna, came out on 18 October 2024: ten original songs, led by Yo no te olvido, built with several different producers so that the record splits audibly between the sound he is known for and something looser. The title is a weather term from the Cantabrian coast, a squall that comes in fast off the sea, which is roughly how he described the record's two halves.

Where things stand in late 2026

The present cycle is an anniversary rather than a new album. The ¿Qué pides tú? 25 Aniversario world tour was announced with the promise that the entire debut would be played, interleaved with the rest of the catalogue, and it opened in Europe in November 2025 with dates in Munich, Berlin, Dublin, Amsterdam, Brussels and London — nearly all of which sold out before the Spanish on-sale. Thirteen American cities followed in February and March 2026, then ten Mexican cities in May.

Latin America took up most of the second half of the year. He played Quito on 6 August and Lima two days later, and in October he worked through fourteen Chilean cities, starting at the Santiago arena on 3 October before heading south towards Patagonia and the lakes.

The record itself has been reissued around the tour: a twenty-fifth anniversary edition on limited blue vinyl and a CD digipack carrying three acoustic re-recordings and five demos from the original sessions. A stripped acoustic version of A gritos de esperanza was released on 28 September 2026 as the trailer for it.

Spain is the unfinished part. Tickets for the Spanish run went on sale at noon on 6 November 2025 through his own site and Ticketmaster; Barcelona's Palau de la Música on 17 September, Bilbao on 24 September and Seville on 26 September have been played, leaving Madrid's La Riviera on 4 November, the Teatro Colón in A Coruña on 28 November and the Roig Arena in Valencia on 10 December 2026.

What the 2026 shows have actually been

The format has held remarkably steady across continents. Setlist.fm's tour average, drawn from the documented sets, lands at twenty-three songs opening with Hay que ver and closing the main set with Sin miedo a nada. Reviewers have counted around twenty to twenty-three on the night and timed the show between roughly ninety minutes and a little over two hours.

At the Teatro Metropólitan in Mexico City on 6 May 2026 — a full house, no support act, a nine o'clock start — the production was described as deliberately plain: a band behind him, a mid-set stretch alone with an acoustic guitar under low light, and little else. A fan threw a Mexican flag onto the stage and he wore it for the rest of the song. In Quito on 6 August the theatre was quiet enough that individual shouted declarations carried to the back, and he spent part of the night joking about what the altitude was doing to his lungs.

Santiago on 3 October ran through Ahora que no estás, Viajar contigo, Me arrepiento, Sabes, Fantasía o realidad, No te rindas and Sigo aquí before the encore, which paired acoustic readings of Temblando and Ella vive en mí with A gritos de esperanza and Sin miedo a nada. The consistent note in the Chilean and Mexican write-ups is nostalgia being handled without much ceremony.

The case he keeps making

Ubago has been blunt about the terms on which he is still working. Speaking to El Tiempo in August 2026 he said he would never make music simply to stay current, and that he tries to stay faithful not to a style but to what he actually wants to write. He also described a practical change in how he tours: concerts arranged in short blocks rather than open-ended months away, a direct consequence of having two school-age children at home.

He has spent years pushing back on the reading of himself as a melancholic, pointing out that the recent stretch of his life has been a good one and that sad melodies are simply where his writing starts. The anniversary tour is the strongest evidence for that distinction — a quarter of a century on, the songs are being sung back to him by audiences who were not alive when they were written.