Rosalía has received Spain's top current music award for LUX. The jury praised the album's ambition, reach and creative risk, while also recognising the wider career behind it.
The €30,000 prize follows the release of LUX in 2025, an album the jury calls ambitious, innovative and transformative. The award also recognises Rosalía's international career and her contribution to Spanish music.
Spain's Ministerio de Cultura announced the decision. The jury said LUX pushes creative boundaries and has won unanimous recognition from critics and the public. It also praised Rosalía's ability to build a personal sound across genres, styles and eras, bringing avant-garde ideas together with cultural heritage. RTVE and El País independently confirmed the album, the €30,000 prize and the main points in the official reasoning.
El País identifies LUX as Rosalía's fourth studio album, adding a new milestone to the career considered by the jury.
The decision is not based on one successful release alone.
The jury pointed to a wider career shaped by research, risk and steady creative change. It also credited Rosalía with helping Spanish music reach audiences around the world. Her work has brought other artists into the creative process through collaboration, and that combination of experimentation and shared work forms a central part of the official reasoning.
Rosalía began recording in 2017 with Los Ángeles. The album grew out of her study of flamenco and won the Premio Ruido from specialist music press as Spain's best album that year. With El mal querer in 2018, she built on those foundations through urban music and pop. The album drew international media attention, with Malamente becoming one of its best-known successes.
The prize is awarded by Spain's Ministry of Culture through the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música (INAEM). ABC's account of the jury's reasoning also highlights Rosalía's work across flamenco, jazz, folk, pop and academic music.
Her next major shift came with Motomami in 2022. The album won strong critical and public approval and added more honours to a career that includes two Grammy Awards and thirteen Latin Grammy Awards. One of those Latin Grammy prizes was Album of the Year for Motomami.
The jury was chaired by Javier Monsalve Iglesias, director general of Performing Arts and Music. Paz Santa Cecilia Aristu, director general of the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música, served as vice-chair. Its members were Ana Belén Faus Guijarro, Nuria Sempere Comas, Isabel Villanueva Benito, Rubén Gutiérrez del Castillo, José Luis Sevillano Romero, Almudena Heredero Borreguero and Antonio Serrano, the previous winner of the award.
Rosalía now joins a list that includes Joan Manuel Serrat, Amaral, Luz Casal, Kiko Veneno, La Mala Rodríguez, Rozalén and Rodrigo Cuevas. Their awards place her within Spain's long-running recognition of artists working across contemporary musical forms.
The jury measured Rosalía's work through more than international visibility. It also looked at how she has reshaped the link between flamenco heritage, pop, urban music and experimentation. LUX supplied the immediate reason for the award, while her earlier albums explain the wider decision. The jury treated artistic risk as a sustained method, not a short-lived phase, and counted collaboration as part of the achievement. The award is administered by Spain's Ministry of Culture through the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música, or INAEM.
