The habanera is a slow dance-song in duple time, a descendant of the contradanza that took shape in nineteenth-century Cuba and spread outward on the trade winds. Its gently rocking rhythm suggests exactly what carried it: the roll of a ship, the lap of harbor water. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, commerce between Torrevieja and Cuba ran heavy and constant, salt going one way, sugar and rum and song coming the other. The sailors who made those crossings were not composers, but they were carriers. They memorized the tunes, brought them back to the taverns and quaysides of home, and planted a Caribbean music so firmly in this Mediterranean town that Torrevieja now claims the habanera as its own.

The contest is staged where the salt itself once passed, at the Eras de la Sal, the old open-air grounds beside the harbor where salt was collected, weighed, and loaded onto ships from 1777 onward. Today the site is an open-air auditorium, its stage set almost at the water's edge, a monument to the salt workers standing nearby. On summer nights the choirs perform under the sky with the Mediterranean at their backs, the same sea the sailors crossed. Few concert halls can claim a setting so bound to the music performed inside it, where the venue, the town's fortune, and the song all trace back to the same white mineral drying in the lagoons.

Held toward the end of July, the competition judges two things at once: the habaneras that give it its heart, and polyphony, the older art of many independent voices woven together. It started as a local affair in 1955 and steadily outgrew its origins, opening to choirs from around the world by 1990 and earning the honorary rank of Fiesta of International Tourist Interest in 1994. The winners come from everywhere. In 2023, the Kammerchor Manila, a choir from Quezon City in the Philippines, swept the board, taking first prize in both the habaneras and polyphony categories along with the overall and best-director awards. A Cuban song, sung in a Spanish salt town, mastered by singers from the Pacific.

A tradition survives only if the young take it up, and Torrevieja plants that seed early. Since 1994, the town has also hosted the International Junior Contest of Habaneras each April, a stage set aside for children's and youth choirs before the grand summer gathering. Watching a hall of children learn to lean into the habanera's rolling rhythm, you see the whole strange journey compressed: a melody that crossed an ocean in the memory of homesick sailors, now handed down to voices that have never smelled the salt of Cuba, only the salt of home.