‘Glastonbury: do you understand?’ Vicky Cornejo looked up and saw 20 kilometers of tents, stages, paths, and lights spread out before her. She couldn’t believe it.

The text she’d received from a friend minutes before expressed exactly what she felt when she reached the festival site. After years of sacrifice and long stints away from home, her dream was coming true.

Cornejo is the founder, composer, producer, singer and accordionist of La Fanfarria del Capitán, the only Argentine band to play at Glastonbury festival this year. Founded in Buenos Aires in 2005, they fuse Balkan folk and rock with ska and Latin rhythms. 

La Fanfarria del Capitán reached millions around the world when they appeared in two episodes of the Spanish Netflix series La Casa de Papel (‘Money Heist’). Their song La Flor y el Libro (The Flower and the Book) is on the show’s soundtrack.

In 2011 they decided to dedicate their lives to traveling and performing. Since then, they have toured Europe and Asia, performing a tightly packed agenda of around 100 gigs a year to stay afloat, including a lot of festivals. Even so, Glastonbury’s size and diversity was a whole new world. Cornejo found herself playing at the same time as Elton John’s final UK show. On the first morning, she awoke to hear Indian-American New Age author Deepak Chopra coming onstage.

“I had followed his meditations for a long time and now Chopra himself was 100 meters away!” she said. “It was like listening to it on YouTube but for real!” 

The invitation to play Glastonbury came from Bimble Bandada, an English art collective that lives out in nature and organizes a festival run entirely on solar power in the south western county of Dorset each summer. After playing the group’s gathering twice, La Fanfarría was invited to play at The Bimble Inn, the collective’s space at Glastonbury. Other bookers then offered more slots on different stages and they ended up doing four shows over the Glastonbury weekend.

Glastonbury Festival has been hosted on the last weekend of June in Somerset, South West England, since 1970. The 200,000 tickets tend to sell out within an hour, months before the headliners are revealed. As well as massive stages headlined by world-famous musicians, there are sectors dedicated to circus, theater, cabaret, and hundreds of other activities.

Glastonbury was an inspiration, a place that invites you to reflect, wander, or get lost, Cornejo said. Everything she stumbled across was creative, interesting and clever. “Since you can’t witness everything, you just keep the part that fate gave you.”

Cornejo and Jeronimo, guitar player and co-founder, are parents to children aged 8 and 18 months, who are traveling with them. They enjoy sharing these adventures with the family, although sticking to a routine can be hard on tour. “Generally, we have many more moments of enjoyment than exhaustion,” Cornejo said. “Gali, the eldest, does his homework and also learns a lot from everything he discovers along the way, from other children and different cultures.” 

At Glastonbury, Cornejo was delighted to encounter plenty of child-friendly activities, including a carpentry workshop. “The children, with real tools and guided by teachers, built a wooden climbing frame in the shape of a huge octopus,” she said. 

La Fanfarria del Capitán continue their ten-week world tour — their thirteenth — with 40 shows in England, Germany, Holland and Belgium.