But despite all these overtures from the biggest names in music, it’s that in-house magic with El Guincho that’s led to viral hits like Malamente, Con Altura, Aute Cuture and Fucking Money Man, which variously dip into flamenco, reggaeton, R&B, rumba catalana, dembow, trap and pop. ​“El Guincho is like my brother,” she says. ​“The connection we have making music, just the two of us in a room, it’s amazing and very special.”

The music they’ve made and the mad devotion it’s inspired have unofficially made this The Summer of Rosalía. If you caught her performing this year, you lucked out. The woman who sang to a few hundred in a tourist trap a few years ago is now flying around the world playing Lollapalooza, Coachella and Glastonbury, New York, Paris and Porto. Though she might have tired of those flights, got bored of those hotel rooms and become a little more accustomed to all that crowd adoration, her 2019 performances still felt pure. This was the tipping point tour; before the mainstream fully takes her as theirs, she could still feel like yours.

When performing, Rosalía feels a responsibility ​“para hacer que pase algo mágico” – to make something magical happen. Of all the festivals she’s played, the most magical came in her hometown, when she headlined Barcelona’s Primavera Sound in May. ​“It felt like volver a casa, coming back home,” she says, all smiles, bright eyes and Burberry check in a minimal central London hotel room. ​“I’d been touring months before I did Primavera and I could feel I’d been doing all the previous shows to reach that performance – to bring something for my people. I arrived in Barcelona and it was so exciting because I saw all my people there supporting me, and I loved that.”

While she has Spanish-speaking fans across the world, nothing can have beaten the ecstatic reactions in Barcelona’s Parc del Fòrum that night. The crowds, which had felt largely international for Miley Cyrus, Solange and Charli XCX, were suddenly overwhelmingly, screamingly, Spanish. Rosalía’s arrival seems to have fulfilled a deep need the country didn’t know it had: to have a global cultural icon, a pop force to call their own. Spanish-­language superstars in recent years have come from Colombia, Puerto Rico or Cuba, but not Spain.

The non-Spanish-speaking world didn’t know they needed all of this either: we’re blessed with new words (that we don’t understand but are inspired to learn), infectious clapping, rhythmic stamping and empowering posturing. To me, as an English-speaker in the crowd, it suddenly felt vital to be completely alienated by unknown lyrics and gestures, isolated and irrelevant in a mass of Hispanophone adoration. The antidote to in-built Anglo cultural arrogance has arrived and it’s fun as fuck. Suddenly Spanish music is speaking to us in a way that English no longer can.

One person in the Primavera crowd fainted and was carried off like a religious effigy (was it down to La Rosi, the booze or the drugs?). ​“Quééé? No way! Quééé?” she repeats, shock-concerned. She says she would have stopped the show if she’d seen it, but she doesn’t like to look at the audience – it’s far too distracting.

“I try to receive the energy and not focus on somebody. I just try to focus on the lyrics, the music, keyboards, percussion, clappers, flamenco singers. There’s a lot going on! It’s not easy. I’m dancing and singing at the same time, no playback at all – no playback AT ALL!” she emphasises. You might be a freak sole recipient of her attention occasionally, though. ​“Sometimes I get excited and I enjoy singing for a specific person in the crowd, but maybe it’s just 10 seconds.”

As that Primavera Saturday night turned into a sunny Sunday morning, and people floated home from the after-parties, the newspapers lining the city’s kiosks already had their headlines. La Vanguardia shouted, ​“ROSALIA BRILLA EN EL PRIMAVERA SOUND” (“Rosalia shines at Primavera Sound”) and El Periódico howled, ​“ROSALIA TIENE PODER” (“Rosalia has power”). We’d not been to bed yet and she was already front-page news (and had jetted off to Paris to play the We Love Green festival).

