Daniela Darcourt: The Life Story Behind the Peruvian Salsa Star

Daniela Alejandra Darcourt Escurra sings salsa as though she has been preparing for it since childhood, and in a real sense she has. Born on 20 April 1996, she grew up in El Porvenir, a neighbourhood in the Lima district of La Victoria, in a house full of sisters, music, and hard work. She was not handed a stage. She danced at children’s parties for ten soles before she was ten years old, studied singing at the National University of Music of Peru in 2004, and took ballet at the cultural centre of the National University of San Marcos in 2006. Step by step, contest by contest, she built a voice that could carry a whole orchestra.

Her name reached a far wider audience when she joined the all-female salsa orchestra Son Tentación in 2016. Two years inside that group taught her how to hold a big stage, how to blend with brass and percussion, and how to win over a crowd that had come to dance. When she left in 2018, she did not fade. She won the television contest El artista del año twice in the same year, released “Probablemente”, and then, in February 2019, released “Señor Mentira” with the Puerto Rican producer Master Chris. That song won the Premio Luces for hit of the year in 2019 and reached number 13 on the Billboard Tropical Songs chart.

What followed was not a straight climb. In June 2019, only weeks after her debut album Esa soy yo appeared, doctors found a polyp on her vocal cords and chronic laryngitis, and she had to stop singing and cancel her concerts. She came back, recorded with Tito Nieves, sang with Tony Succar, coached on La Voz Perú, La Voz Senior and La Voz Kids, sold out two homecoming concerts called El Reencuentro in November 2021, and released the albums Empezando otra vez in 2022, Catarsis in 2023, Renacer in 2024 and Soy in 2025. Catarsis brought her a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Salsa Album. In 2024 Forbes named her one of the fifty most powerful Peruvian women.

El Porvenir, Five Sisters, and Work at Eight

El Porvenir sits inside La Victoria, one of the busiest districts in Lima, where markets open early, buses crowd the avenues, and music spills out of shops and houses. Daniela was born there on 20 April 1996, the daughter of Carlos Darcourt and Rosario Escurra, and she spent her childhood alongside five sisters. A house with six girls is loud, crowded, and full of opinions, and it gave her an early education in standing her ground. Nobody in that house could afford to be quiet for long, and Daniela learned to make herself heard without shouting over everyone else.

Her family life was not smooth. Accounts of her childhood describe a household that was, in her own words, a little disorganised, where money was tight and the adults carried their own troubles. That matters because it explains the next fact, which surprises many people who only know her from television. At eight years old, she started working. A school friend and she were asked to dance at children’s birthday parties, and they were paid ten soles each time. Ten soles is a small sum, but to an eight-year-old it was real money earned by real work, and it taught her something that no classroom could teach: a performance is a job, the audience is waiting, and you must deliver whether you feel like it or not.

She did not treat those parties as a joke. Dancing in front of strangers, keeping a smile while tired children ran around, learning to move to music that changed without warning — all of it was training. It also put her in front of people who were not her family and who owed her nothing. If she danced well, they clapped. If she did not, they looked away. That honest reaction stayed with her, and years later, when she sang in front of thousands, she still seemed to perform as though every listener had to be won over again from the start.

Music was already part of her daily life by then. In 2004, when she was eight, she began studying singing and music at the National University of Music of Peru, an institution that takes its teaching seriously and expects its young students to practise, listen, and learn the rules before they break them. Two years later, in 2006, she added ballet at the cultural centre of San Marcos, one of the oldest universities in the Americas. Ballet is not salsa, and that was the point. It taught her posture, balance, breath control, and how to move across a stage without wasting energy. A salsa singer who can dance well has an advantage, because the audience watches the body as much as it listens to the voice.

Her sisters were part of this world too, and the house in El Porvenir shaped the singer she became. She did not grow up in a quiet suburb with a piano in the corner and a teacher who came to the house. She grew up in a working neighbourhood where music came from the street, where people sang while they worked, and where a girl who could sing was noticed. La Victoria gave her a direct, unpolished quality that later audiences recognised at once. She did not sound like someone pretending to be from the street. She sounded like someone who had lived there.

Classrooms, Ballet Shoes, and a First Television Win

The years between her first lessons and her first television appearance were slow, and that slowness is important. A child who starts studying music at eight does not become a star at nine. She practises scales, she learns to breathe from the stomach rather than the throat, she hears her own voice played back and dislikes most of what she hears, and she keeps going. Daniela did that for years, and the discipline shows in her later singing. Her voice is strong, but it is also controlled. She can hold a long note without it wobbling, she can sing quietly without disappearing, and she can push a chorus hard without shouting. Those are learned skills, not accidents.

Ballet added a different kind of discipline. In a ballet class, the teacher corrects the smallest details: the angle of a foot, the line of an arm, the way weight shifts from one leg to the other. A singer who has been through that training does not wander around a stage by chance. She knows where she is, she knows what her body is doing, and she uses movement to help the song rather than to distract from it. When Daniela dances on stage during a fast salsa number, the movement looks easy, and that ease is the result of years of classes that were anything but easy.

In 2008, when she was twelve, she was invited onto Sábados tropicales, a television singing contest, and she won it. A win at twelve does not make a career, but it does something else: it shows a young singer that she can perform under lights, in front of cameras, with judges watching, and still sing well. It also puts a name in front of people who book shows. After the programme, she joined the Coro Ángeles, a choir connected to Marita Cabanillas, and toured churches, events, and television programmes around Lima with them. Choir singing is the opposite of solo stardom. You must listen to the singers beside you, match their volume, and hold your part without showing off. That training in blending would matter a great deal when she later joined a salsa orchestra.

Those years also taught her patience. There was no single moment when a record company arrived and changed her life. There were small jobs, small stages, and small audiences, and she kept turning up. She sang in places where the sound was poor and the crowd was more interested in talking than listening, and she learned to sing through that. Many young singers quit at that stage because the gap between the dream and the reality is too wide. She did not quit, and the reason seems simple: she had been working since she was eight, so work itself did not frighten her.

By the time she reached her late teens, she had something that many talented teenagers do not have: a trained voice, a trained body, stage experience, and a clear idea of what kind of music she wanted to sing. Salsa was the music she had grown up hearing in La Victoria, and it was also the music that suited her voice best. It needs power, rhythm, and feeling, and she had all three. What she needed next was a bigger platform, and in 2013 one arrived.

Perú Tiene Talento and Two Years Inside Son Tentación

In 2013, at seventeen, Daniela entered the second season of Perú tiene talento, the Peruvian version of the Got Talent format, and reached the semi-finals. A semi-final place is not a victory, but for a seventeen-year-old from La Victoria it was a serious achievement. The programme put her in front of a national audience, and it tested her in a way that small stages could not. She had to choose a song, rehearse it, perform it once, and accept the judges’ verdict in front of the country. She handled it well enough to go deep into the competition, and the exposure gave her name a value it had not had before.

Three years passed before her next big step, and those years were not wasted. She kept singing, kept performing, and kept learning the business of music from the inside. Then, in 2016, after several meetings with the producers, she joined Son Tentación, an all-female salsa orchestra that was already popular in Peru. The group was founded by Paula Arias, and it had a clear identity: women playing and singing salsa with power and style, in a scene where men had long held most of the leading roles. Daniela became one of its main vocalists, and for two years she sang with the group across the country.

Son Tentación gave her three things she could not get on her own. First, it gave her a regular audience. The orchestra played concerts, festivals, and private events, and every show put her in front of people who already loved salsa. Second, it gave her a band. Singing with a full salsa orchestra means singing with trumpets, trombones, piano, bass, congas, bongos, and timbales all playing at once, and a singer must learn to ride that sound rather than fight it. Third, it gave her a reputation. People in the Peruvian salsa world began to talk about the young vocalist with the big voice, and other musicians began to watch her.

Her time in the group was not long, but it was complete. Two years is enough to learn how a professional orchestra works, how tours are organised, how a set list is built, and how a singer paces herself through a long night. It is also enough to learn what you want to do next. Daniela decided that she wanted to sing under her own name, with her own orchestra, choosing her own songs. Leaving a successful group is a risk, because the group’s name protects you and its audience belongs partly to the group. She took the risk in 2018, and the speed of what happened next suggests that she had been ready for some time.

Probablemente, El Artista del Año, and Señor Mentira

Daniela began her solo career in 2018 as Daniela Darcourt and Orchestra, and her first formal solo show took place at La Casa de la Salsa in Lima. That venue choice was a statement. La Casa de la Salsa is a place where salsa fans go to dance and to judge singers honestly, and a new soloist who opens there is asking to be measured against the best. She was ready for the test, and in August 2018 she released “Probablemente”, a song that quickly found an audience and gave her solo career its first clear hit.

The same year brought her two victories on El artista del año, the talent contest hosted by Gisela Valcárcel on América Televisión. She won the second season outright, and then she won the third season, called El dúo perfecto, together with the singer Pedro Loli. Winning once is impressive. Winning twice in the same year, in two different formats, is a different kind of statement. It showed that she could sing alone and in a duet, that she could handle the pressure of a live contest, and that television audiences liked her enough to vote for her again and again. Those wins gave her a national profile that no radio hit alone could have given her.

Then came the song that changed everything. On 14 February 2019, Valentine’s Day, she released “Señor Mentira” with the Puerto Rican producer Master Chris. The video, directed by Daniel Rodríguez Botero and produced by Cientoonce Agencia, told the story of a prisoner played by Daniela herself, a bold visual choice for a salsa video. The song is about a man who lies, and it is sung not with self-pity but with anger and clarity. Listeners recognised the story at once, and the song spread quickly. It entered the Billboard Tropical Songs chart, stayed there for several weeks, and reached number 13. At the end of 2019 it won the Premio Luces for hit of the year.

A week after the song’s release, on 21 February 2019, Daniela walked the red carpet at the Premios Lo Nuestro in Miami, and five days later she released the video for “Adiós amor” on YouTube. In May she travelled to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for the Heat Latin Music Awards, where she had two nominations and performed “Señor Mentira” on stage. She did not win that night, but the performance mattered more than the result. She was now singing her song on an international stage, in front of an audience that included some of the biggest names in Latin music, and she held her own.

Esa Soy Yo, a Damaged Voice, and a Pause in 2019

On the night of 31 May 2019, Daniela released Esa soy yo, her first studio album, made with Master Chris. The album held nine new songs, and it was meant to be the proof that she was more than a singer of singles. An album asks a different question from a hit song. A hit asks whether one song can catch the public’s ear. An album asks whether a singer has enough to say to fill a whole record, whether the songs fit together, and whether the voice can carry different moods. Esa soy yo answered those questions with a set of songs about love, lies, and starting again, sung with the confidence of someone who had spent years preparing for exactly this moment.

The celebration did not last. In June 2019, only weeks after the album appeared, Daniela announced that she had to stop singing for a while. Doctors had found a polyp on her vocal cords and chronic laryngitis, a condition that makes the voice hoarse, weak, and painful to use. She cancelled her concerts and began treatment. For a singer, this is the worst kind of news. A dancer with an injured leg can still teach. A guitarist with a broken hand can still write. A singer whose voice is damaged cannot do the one thing that defines her work, and every day of rest feels like a day lost. She faced that fear in public, at the very moment when her career was rising fastest.

She did not stay away long. In July she made a small musical appearance in the circus of Ernesto Pimentel, even though only days earlier she had said that she still needed weeks to recover fully. In August she returned as a special guest for the final of the programme Reinas del show. The return was careful rather than triumphant, and that caution was wise. A voice that has been injured needs time, and a singer who rushes back risks doing lasting harm. She seemed to understand that, and she rebuilt her schedule step by step rather than trying to make up for lost time in a single week.

The rest of 2019 showed how wide her work had become. In October she joined the jury of the fourth season of Yo soy Kids, the children’s imitation contest, which began on 2 December 2019 and ran into January 2020, and she stayed on as a judge for the fifth season as well. Judging children is a different job from singing for adults. It needs patience, kindness, and the ability to criticise without crushing a young person’s confidence. She also collaborated with the Puerto Rican salsa group N’Klabe on “Probabilidad de amor” for their album Nuestra esquina. That song earned a nomination at the Heat Latin Music Awards in 2020, reached the top five on the Billboard Tropical Airplay chart, and was later released in a pop version. In July 2020 she recorded “Si tú te atreves” with Tito Nieves, one of the great names of salsa, a collaboration that placed her beside a singer she must have grown up listening to.

The pandemic years changed the shape of her work without stopping it. From July to October 2020 she appeared on the comedy programme El reventonazo de la chola on América Televisión, and she joined other Peruvian artists in a government campaign to encourage tourism after the damage caused by COVID-19. In November 2020 the Peruvian-Cuban group Septeto Acarey invited her to sing “La balanza” on their album Ser feliz, and in December she performed at the Ricardo Palma Book Fair in Lima. In December 2020 she also recorded “Fuego eterno”, a rock collaboration with Jhovan Tomasevich, the singer of the Peruvian rock band Zen, a song that had been planned for March but was delayed by the pandemic. By the end of 2020 she was, with more than 32 million streams, the most listened-to salsa artist on Spotify in Peru. The voice that had been damaged in June 2019 had not only recovered. It had grown stronger.

La Voz Perú, El Reencuentro, and the Albums That Followed

In June 2021 Daniela joined the coaching panel of La voz Perú alongside Eva Ayllón, Guillermo Dávila, and Mike Bahía, and she stayed until August of that year. Coaching on The Voice is not the same as judging a contest. A coach chooses singers for a team, works with them in rehearsals, picks songs that suit their voices, and tries to help them grow week by week. Eva Ayllón is a legend of Peruvian music, and sitting beside her as an equal was a sign of how far Daniela had come in three years as a soloist. She went on to coach in the other versions of the format as well: La voz Senior with Eva Ayllón, Tony Succar, and Pimpinela, and La voz Kids with Eva Ayllón, Christian Yaipén, and Joey Montana. She later coached the first season of La Voz Generaciones in 2022 and 2023.

July 2021 took her to the United States for a run of concerts in New Jersey, Virginia, Chicago, Miami, and Tampa, part of her Esa Soy Yo tour. Touring the United States matters for a Peruvian salsa singer because it tests the music in front of audiences who have heard the great salsa singers from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and New York. A singer who can win over those crowds has proved something real. She also worked with Tony Succar that year, singing on his live album Live in Peru, which was later nominated for a Grammy in the best Latin tropical album category, and she launched a documentary series called Esa soy yo on YouTube.

The most emotional moment of that period came in November 2021. After almost two years without performing in Peru because of the pandemic, she gave two concerts called El Reencuentro with her orchestra and guest artists, on 12 and 13 November 2021, in the amphitheatre of the Parque de la Exposición in Lima. Both shows sold out in three days. A documentary about the concerts was shown on América Televisión on 26 February 2022, and two live albums, El Reencuentro, vol. 1 and El Reencuentro, vol. 2, were released in March 2022. The title said it all. This was a reunion: with her country, with her audience, and with the stage she had been forced to leave.

Her second studio album, Empezando otra vez, was announced for 25 May 2022, and it brought together collaborators of the highest level, including Rey Ruiz, Tito Nieves, Alain Pérez, Gino Picart Jr., Tony Succar, Dayhan Díaz, and Jesús “El Viejo” Rodríguez. Pérez produced five of the album’s nine songs. The title, which means “starting again”, fitted a singer who had already started again more than once: after leaving Son Tentación, after the voice injury, and after the pandemic. On 29 March 2022 she had sung the Peruvian national anthem at the Estadio Nacional in Lima before the World Cup qualifier between Peru and Paraguay, a public honour that few singers receive.

Catarsis followed in 2023, first as an EP and then in an extended full-length edition, and it earned her a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Salsa Album, the first of her career. Renacer arrived in 2024, and Soy followed in 2025. In 2024 she also acted in the film Vaguito, playing a character called Lola, her first film role. Forbes named her one of the fifty most powerful Peruvian women of 2024, a recognition that looked beyond music to her influence in the country as a whole. She had gone from dancing at children’s parties for ten soles to being listed among the most powerful women in Peru, and she was still only in her late twenties.

The National Anthem, the Cinema, and a Career Still Moving

Daniela’s story does not end with a single triumph, and that is part of what makes it worth telling. She has not had one breakthrough and then a long, quiet decline. She has had a series of beginnings, each one harder than the last, and each one handled with the same discipline she learned as a child. The girl who studied at the National University of Music at eight, the twelve-year-old who won Sábados tropicales, the seventeen-year-old semi-finalist on Perú tiene talento, the vocalist who spent two years in Son Tentación, the soloist who won El artista del año twice, the singer who lost her voice and won it back, the coach on La Voz Perú, the headliner who sold out El Reencuentro in three days: these are not separate people. They are the same person, growing in public, and learning in front of everyone.

Her place in Peruvian salsa is now secure, but it is a particular kind of place. She is not a singer who copies the great salsa voices of the past, and she is not a singer who has abandoned salsa for pop. She sings salsa with a modern sound, with songs about the lives that young Peruvian women actually live, and with a voice that carries both power and control. Older listeners hear the tradition in her singing. Younger listeners hear themselves. That double appeal is rare, and it is the reason her concerts bring together people of very different ages.

She has also become a visible figure beyond music. Her work on television, her film role in Vaguito, her documentary series, and her place on the Forbes list all show a career that has grown wider than a single stage. She is still young, and her later albums suggest that she is still changing as an artist. Catarsis was a more personal record than Esa soy yo, and Renacer and Soy continued that movement towards songs that reflect her own life rather than songs chosen only because they might become hits. If that direction continues, her most interesting work may still be ahead of her, and her audience will be watching to see what she does next.

My Take:

I keep coming back to the ten soles. Daniela Darcourt was eight years old, dancing at children’s birthday parties with a school friend, and being paid ten soles for the work. I think about that because it explains so much of what came later. A child who has been paid to perform learns early that applause is not a gift. It is something you earn by turning up, doing the job well, and making the people in front of you happy. I admire that lesson, because it is a hard one to learn and an easy one to forget once you become famous. Daniela does not seem to have forgotten it. Even now, when she sings in front of thousands, she performs like someone who knows that the audience owes her nothing.

I also think a lot about the way she was trained. She studied singing at the National University of Music of Peru when she was eight, and she studied ballet at San Marcos when she was ten. Those are not the choices of a child who stumbled into fame. They are the choices of a family and a young girl who took music seriously before anyone outside Lima had heard her name. I respect that seriousness, because the music world is full of people who want the fame without the training, and the training is what lasts when the fame fades. Her voice is strong, but it is also controlled, and that control comes from years of lessons that nobody saw. When I listen to her, I hear the lessons as much as I hear the talent.

What strikes me most about her career is the pattern of starting again. She started again when she left Son Tentación in 2018. She started again when her voice was damaged in June 2019 and she had to cancel her concerts. She started again after the pandemic, when she had not performed in Peru for almost two years and then sold out El Reencuentro in three days. Most careers have one big break and then a slow decline. Hers has a series of breaks, and each one has made her stronger. I find that hopeful, because it suggests that a setback is not the end of a story. It can be the start of a new chapter, if the person is willing to do the work.

The voice injury is the part of her story that I think about most, because it is the part that could have ended everything. A polyp on the vocal cords and chronic laryngitis, diagnosed in June 2019, only weeks after her first album was released, is the kind of news that would frighten any singer. She had just released Esa soy yo, she had just won the Premio Luces for “Señor Mentira”, and suddenly she could not sing. I admire the way she handled it, because she did not pretend it was nothing, and she did not disappear either. She took treatment, she cancelled what she had to cancel, she came back carefully with a small appearance in July and a guest spot in August, and she rebuilt her voice step by step. That takes patience, and patience is not a quality that fame usually teaches. It is a quality that a childhood of hard work teaches.

I also admire her work as a coach on La Voz Perú, La Voz Senior, and La Voz Kids, because coaching shows a different kind of confidence from performing. A performer can hide behind a song. A coach has to listen, to explain, to criticise kindly, and to help a young singer find a voice that is not a copy of the coach’s own voice. Sitting beside Eva Ayllón, a legend of Peruvian music, and coaching as her equal, was a sign of how far Daniela had come. I think about the young singers she coached, and I hope that at least some of them learned what she learned as a child: that talent is the start, not the end, and that the work you do when nobody is watching is the work that matters most.

Her song “Señor Mentira” is the one I return to when I want to understand why she became so popular so quickly. It is a song about a man who lies, and it is sung with anger rather than sadness. The singer is not asking for pity. She is naming what happened, and she is refusing to be fooled again. I think many women in Peru recognised that feeling at once, and I think that recognition is why the song won the Premio Luces and reached number 13 on the Billboard Tropical Songs chart. A song that tells the truth about a common experience will always travel further than a song that only sounds pretty. Daniela understood that, and she has kept choosing songs that tell the truth about love, lies, and moving on.

I do not think her story is only about talent. I think it is about discipline, and I think discipline is the part that young people most need to hear. She studied music at eight, ballet at ten, won a television contest at twelve, reached the semi-finals of Perú tiene talento at seventeen, spent two years in Son Tentación, won El artista del año twice in one year, and then built a solo career song by song. None of those steps happened by luck. Each one took preparation, and each one prepared her for the next. I wish more young singers understood that. They see the sold-out concerts and the awards, and they think the success came quickly. It did not. It came slowly, over eighteen years, and the slowness is the reason it has lasted.

There is something else I respect about her, and it is the way she has stayed close to her roots without being trapped by them. She grew up in El Porvenir, in La Victoria, in a house with five sisters and little money, and she has never hidden that. She talks about her neighbourhood, she sings for audiences there, and she carries that background into her music. At the same time, she has recorded with Tito Nieves, worked with Tony Succar, toured the United States, and been named by Forbes as one of the most powerful Peruvian women. She has not had to choose between where she came from and where she is going. She has carried both with her, and I think that is a rare achievement.

I also think about the national anthem, which she sang at the Estadio Nacional on 29 March 2022 before Peru played Paraguay in a World Cup qualifier. Singing a national anthem in a packed stadium is a strange and difficult job. The crowd is nervous, the players are nervous, and the singer is alone with a song that everyone knows and everyone will judge. It is not a performance where you can hide behind a band. It is a test of nerve and of voice, and she passed it. I think that moment matters, because it showed that her country trusted her with something that belonged to everyone, not just to her fans. That trust is not given lightly, and she had earned it.

If I could ask her one question, I would ask her about the months after the voice injury, when she could not sing and did not know when she would sing again. I would ask her what she did with those days, and what she thought about. I suspect that she thought about the eight-year-old dancing at birthday parties, and about the twelve-year-old winning Sábados tropicales, and about how far she had already come, and I suspect that those memories gave her the patience to wait for her voice to return. I think that is often how people survive a setback: not by looking forward to a future they cannot see, but by looking back at the distance they have already travelled, and by trusting that the same discipline will carry them forward again.

I also want to say something honest about her later albums, because I think they show a singer who is still growing. Esa soy yo was a debut, full of energy and confidence, and it did its job. Empezando otra vez was a record about starting again, and it brought together some of the best musicians in salsa. Catarsis was more personal, and it earned her a Latin Grammy nomination, which is a recognition that matters because it comes from musicians rather than from sales. Renacer and Soy continued that movement towards songs that reflect her own life. I do not think she has made her best record yet, and I mean that as praise. A singer who is still growing at thirty is a singer who will still surprise her audience, and I would rather follow a singer who is still growing than one who made her best work at twenty-two and then repeated it.

There is a lesson in her story for anyone who dreams of a career in music, and it is a simple one: learn your craft before you ask for attention. She learned to sing, she learned to dance, she learned to blend in a choir, she learned to hold a stage in an orchestra, and only then did she ask the public to listen to her alone. That order matters. Too many young singers want the solo career first and the training later, and they discover that the public is not patient with a voice that has not been trained. Daniela did it the other way round, and the public has stayed with her because of it. I hope young singers in Peru and everywhere else pay attention to that order, because it is the difference between a career that lasts and a moment that fades.

I think about her sisters too, and about the house in El Porvenir where six girls grew up together. I wonder what it was like to be the one who became famous, and whether her sisters still tease her, and whether they still sing together at home. I think that kind of family grounding matters, because fame can make a person forget who they were before anyone knew their name. A house full of sisters does not let you forget. They knew you when you were eight and dancing for ten soles, and they will remind you of it. That is a gift, even if it does not always feel like one, and I think it has kept Daniela honest in a way that fame alone never could.

Finally, I think her story is a reminder that a career in music is not a single climb but a series of climbs, and that the climber matters more than the mountain. She has climbed out of La Victoria, out of Son Tentación, out of a voice injury, and out of a pandemic, and each time she has reached a higher place. She is still climbing, and her audience is climbing with her. I do not know what her next album will sound like, or what her next concert will hold, but I know that she will approach it with the same discipline she learned as a child, and that is enough reason to keep listening. A singer who works that hard, and who has come that far, deserves to be heard.

I also think about “Probablemente”, her first solo single from August 2018, because it is easy to overlook now that “Señor Mentira” is so much bigger. A first single after leaving a group is a test of nerve. The singer has no group name to hide behind, no shared blame if the song fails, and no certainty that the audience will follow her alone. “Probablemente” worked, and it worked because it sounded like her: direct, rhythmic, and sung with a voice that did not apologise for its power. I think that first step mattered more than people remember, because without it there would have been no “Señor Mentira” six months later. A career is built on the quiet first steps as much as on the loud triumphs, and I try to remember that when I listen to her early records.

There is one more thing I want to say, and it is about the Forbes list. In 2024 Forbes named her one of the fifty most powerful Peruvian women, and I think that recognition means something different from a music award. A music award says that your song was popular. A place on a list of powerful women says that your work has changed something in the country, that people outside music are paying attention, and that young women can look at you and see a path. I do not think Daniela set out to be on that list when she was dancing at birthday parties for ten soles. She set out to sing, and the singing led her there. That is how influence usually works: it follows the work, it does not come before it, and the people who chase influence first rarely earn it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Daniela Darcourt earn money as a child in Lima?

She danced at children’s birthday parties with a school friend from the age of eight, and they were paid ten soles each time. She also began studying singing at the National University of Music of Peru in 2004 and ballet at the San Marcos cultural centre in 2006.

Which television contest did Daniela Darcourt win at twelve?

She won Sábados tropicales in 2008, when she was twelve years old. She later reached the semi-finals of Perú tiene talento in 2013, and she won El artista del año twice in 2018, once alone and once in a duet with Pedro Loli.

How long did Daniela Darcourt sing with Son Tentación?

She joined the all-female salsa orchestra in 2016 and stayed for two years, leaving in 2018 to start her solo career. Her first formal solo show was at La Casa de la Salsa in Lima, and she released “Probablemente” in August 2018.

What happened to Daniela Darcourt’s voice in 2019?

In June 2019, shortly after her debut album Esa soy yo was released, doctors found a polyp on her vocal cords and chronic laryngitis. She cancelled concerts and took treatment, then returned gradually, appearing in a circus show in July and at the Reinas del show final in August.

Which Daniela Darcourt album earned a Latin Grammy nomination?

Catarsis, released in 2023, earned her a nomination for Best Salsa Album at the Latin Grammy Awards. Her earlier albums were Esa soy yo in 2019 and Empezando otra vez in 2022, followed by Renacer in 2024 and Soy in 2025.

What did Daniela Darcourt do on La Voz Perú?

She joined the coaching panel of La voz Perú in June 2021 with Eva Ayllón, Guillermo Dávila, and Mike Bahía. She also coached on La voz Senior, La voz Kids, and La Voz Generaciones, and she had earlier served as a judge on Yo soy Kids.

Did Daniela Darcourt sing the Peruvian national anthem at a football match?

Yes, on 29 March 2022 she sang the national anthem at the Estadio Nacional in Lima before the World Cup qualifier between Peru and Paraguay. She also acted in the film Vaguito in 2024, playing a character called Lola.