The Police played the Quinta Vergara in 1982, when the amphitheatre was still learning what it could hold. Bucks Fizz and Shakin’ Stevens followed in 1983, Sheena Easton in 1984. Then, for a long time, the British invasion paused. When it resumed, it came as a decades long encore: Duran Duran in 2000, Simply Red in 2009, Sting in 2011, Morrissey in 2012, Rick Astley in 2016, The Cult in 2025, and Pet Shop Boys in 2026. Every one of them forged in the furnace of the 1980s. Every one of them, sooner or later, drawn to a coastal Chilean city most of them had probably never heard of until the booking came through.

The Festival Internacional de la Canción de Viña del Mar, Latin America’s largest music event, has been doing this since 1960: pulling the world to a single stage and watching what happens when it meets the Monstruo, the audience that has booed acts off mid song and carried others to tears. Pet Shop Boys, playing their Dreamworld set in February 2026, were hailed as the finest performance in the festival’s history. The Cult, a year earlier, walked off clutching a Gaviota de Plata, the silver seagull the Monstruo bestows only when genuinely moved.

Neither band, one suspects, knew much about the man who made the stage worth standing on.

From the first edition, the orchestra was directed by Izidor Handler, a Polish born musician who had been a principal player in Chile’s national symphony before settling in Viña del Mar. Handler built the city’s Sinfónica, organised the conservatory that still carries his name, and created the Dr Luis Sigall International Music Competition, whose first prize was renamed in his honour. He died in 1987 in Linz, Austria, while travelling on competition business. The same year, in a different register entirely, The Cult released Electric and Simply Red were selling out arenas. None of them knew yet that they would share a stage Handler had built.

Handler’s name carries the unmistakable stamp of the Central and Eastern European Jewish diaspora, the same migration that seeded institutions across Latin America and, of course, built the State of Israel. He was not Israeli. But his biography rhymes with those who arrived in the land that would become Israel with conservatory training and European traditions and built the Israel Philharmonic from scratch. Bronislaw Huberman, also Polish, founded that orchestra in 1936. Handler founded his around the same period. Two Polish musicians. Two coastal cities. Two institutions that outlived them.

Israel’s direct connection to the festival is less well known but no less striking. The international song competition, modelled loosely on Eurovision, invited nations to send entries. Israel accepted. Israeli contestants competed, placed, and on at least one occasion won.

The most resonant appearance came in 1991, the year Faith No More played the same stage. The Gulf War had begun in January. Scud missiles were falling on Tel Aviv. In Viña del Mar, the organisers replaced their traditional Aplausómetro, the crowd noise meter that decided winners, with a special trophy: a Gaviota de la Paz, a peace seagull. The entire edition was renamed the Festival de la Paz.

On that stage, while Israelis were sealing rooms with plastic sheeting and reaching for gas masks, Israel’s representative, Shlomit Aharon, placed second with a song called “Morning Love.” There was something quietly extraordinary about a country under missile attack sending a performer halfway around the world to sing about love in the morning at a festival renamed for peace.

The previous year had brought another Israeli contestant, one who had already represented Israel at Eurovision 1989 in Lausanne. The crossover between Eurovision and Viña del Mar is revealing. Both competitions are, beneath the sequins, exercises in soft power. Bucks Fizz, who won Eurovision in 1981, played the Quinta Vergara two years later. Same conveyor belt of national representation, same logic of cultural projection, different hemispheres. Israel has understood this longer than most. It won Eurovision four times before many of its neighbours would recognise it on a map.

What connects Handler’s baton to Aharon’s microphone is the thing Israel’s critics most consistently underestimate: the long, patient reach of cultural presence. Hard power announces itself. Soft power lays foundations, builds conservatories, and sends contestants to stages that other hands built decades earlier. The Jewish diaspora did not merely survive dispersion. It seeded. The pattern is the same whether the city is Viña del Mar, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, or Haifa.

There is a Hebrew word, davka, that captures a particular quality of insistence. Doing the unexpected thing precisely because circumstances argue against it. Sending a singer to Chile during a missile war is davka. Building a symphony orchestra in a coastal Chilean town when you have come from a country that no longer exists in its former shape is davka. Competing at Eurovision, and winning, when half the continent will not shake your hand is davka. Sting, who returned to the Quinta Vergara solo in 2011, had already been there with The Police in 1982, when the festival operated under Pinochet’s shadow. These are artists, and nations, that show up.

The Quinta Vergara holds twenty thousand. After the final act each February, the amphitheatre empties into the Chilean summer night, and the city returns to its Pacific fog and weekend markets. The conservatory still carries Handler’s name. The Gaviota de la Paz was first minted for a war, and the peace it named has yet to arrive.

But the seagull had already been flying, in a sense, since 1960, when a man from Poland picked up his baton and a festival found its voice. Forty three years of British bands later, it is still finding it.