NIA

The Quinta Vergara stage gave NIA one of her clearest steps into Latin America. In 2025, she represented Spain in the international competition at the Viña del Mar Festival in Chile, one of the region’s most watched music events. She arrived as a Canary Islands artist already known in Spain for winning Operación Triunfo, but the festival placed her in front of a different audience. NIA won the Silver Gaviota for Best Performer in the international competition. The award came with an 11,000 dollar prize, and Spanish and Latin American media framed the result as a major boost for her outside Spain. For an artist whose public story began on Spanish television, Viña del Mar put her name into a Latin American festival tradition where the audience and jury can change the scale of a career in one night.

NIA remembers music being there before she had words for a career. She was born Estefanía Correia González in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and she has said that her passion for singing goes back as far as she can remember. Around the age of nine, her grandmother noticed that she had something and signed her up for singing classes. That early push became a long apprenticeship rather than a quick jump to fame. As a child and teenager, NIA trained in voice and modern music, appeared on television contests in Spain, and later joined the choir of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Gran Canaria. Those years gave her the stage habits that people would later see on national television. At 19, she auditioned for the musical The Lion King and got in. She moved to Madrid and spent four years in the production, training in singing and acting while building a professional life away from the Canary Islands. Before Operación Triunfo made her widely known in 2020, she had already spent years learning how to carry a stage.