Julia Salvi: How a Cali Native Put Colombia on the Classical Music Map

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Julia Salvi helped put Colombia on the classical music map through 20 years of cultural work. A classical orchestra performs in a historic Cartagena venue, representing Colombia's growing presence in international classical music. Credit: Jhoan Baron / ColombiaOne (AI-generated picture). For editorial use only. Julia Salvi, a Cali native and founder of the Salvi Foundation, has spent two decades helping establish Colombia as a serious destination for international classical music, an achievement most visibly represented by the Cartagena Music Festival, which celebrates 20 uninterrupted years of work this year and has held official Cultural Heritage status for the past three years. More than 509,000 spectators have attended the festival's twenty editions, and over 15,000 tourists now travel to Cartagena every year specifically to hear world-class talent perform some of classical music's most emblematic works. Salvi, now 71, began this journey after studying economics at Bogota's Javeriana University and later leaving for London to study English at a young age. She pursued the vision alongside her husband, Victor Salvi, an Italian-American luthier (a craftsman who builds and repairs stringed instruments) and harpist who introduced her to Europe's musical world before his death in 2015, and together they spent 30 years of marriage convinced that Colombia deserved a genuine connection to the world's highest levels of artistic and academic excellence. What began as a festival built around music eventually grew into something considerably larger, as Salvi and her team recognized that the project could become a meeting point for education, discipline, knowledge exchange between generations, and real opportunities for growth across Cartagena's communities. Julia Salvi's impact on Colombia's classical music scene Colombia's Cartagena Music Festival has produced results that go well beyond ticket sales across its twenty editions, since the Salvi Foundation has brought together 3,920 artists, presented 529 concerts, and offered more than 2,700 hours of master classes to musicians eager to learn from world-class instructors. The Foundation also trained 13,000 people through its luthiery centers, teaching the specialized craft of building and repairing instruments, and generated tangible impact across 80 neighborhoods throughout Cartagena. Beyond the festival itself, the Foundation partnered with allied companies to develop the Harmony in PROgress (Armonia en PROgreso) project in La Boquilla, a program that teaches young people from that community to play musical instruments, and that effort already produced a scholarship to Boston's Berklee College of Music, another to Italy's Umbria Jazz festival, and the formation of both a jazz big band and a symphonic band drawn from local youth. Salvi's team also created the Ibague Festival, which across six editions has drawn nearly 40,000 attendees of its own. These achievements earned Salvi Italy's Order of the Star in 2019, while the European magazine Classic FM named Cartagena's festival one of the ten most magical on the planet, recognition that places Colombia's cultural work firmly within an international conversation most observers wouldn't have expected two decades earlier. How Julia Salvi built a lasting music legacy Salvi insists her leadership never grew out of theory but instead emerged from real challenges she faced as a woman, a cultural ambassador, and a mother of two, explaining that scarce resources, closed doors, and moments requiring a fresh start reveal what a person is genuinely made of. That resilience, paired with her characteristically warm and maternal presence, turned her into an example for anyone betting on cultural management as a tool for transforming society. Salvi describes herself as a music lover who enjoys popular genres and vallenato just as much as classical repertoire, and she rejects any notion that classical music belongs to certain social classes or ranks above other genres, though she maintains it teaches something genuinely valuable about coexistence. As she puts it, classical music invites people to wait, pay attention, and recognize when a particular voice should emerge, since individual musicians can shine brilliantly on their own, but an orchestra only exists once everyone learns to listen to each other, a lesson she believes Colombia as a country could stand to learn as well. Cellist Santiago Cañon, violinist Laura Hoyos, and soprano Julieth Lozano, all now internationally recognized, exemplify exactly how far opportunity can carry someone when talent, discipline, and mentorship come together, proof that Colombia's investment in cultural leadership continues paying forward through the generations Salvi's work now reaches.