For 10 weekends this summer, thousands of fans gathered at El Coliseo in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to witness Bad Bunny’s “No me quiero ir de aquí” residency. There’s not a bad seat in the arena, but there was one place of honor—a spot in “la casita,” a one-story house that served as a second stage. Every night, its patio filled with a mix of randomly selected spectators and celebrities including LeBron James, John Hamm, Austin Butler, Darren Aronofsky, Kylian Mbappé, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and more. One Friday, a particularly special group appeared on the porch of la casita: the residency’s stage designers, an all-Puerto Rican team who made Bad Bunny’s vision of a set representing Puerto Rico’s past, present, and future a reality.
“I brought my eldest daughter,” Rafael Pérez, who worked on construction for “No me quiero ir de aquí,” tells AD. He and his crew built la casita, along with the primary stage, a realistic mountain inspired by the Puerto Rican countryside. “To witness the show alongside her was so sentimental. I know I’m going to carry it with me for a long, long time.”
Days after he released his newest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Bad Bunny posted an Instagram reel announcing the residency. “For now, I’m in Puerto Rico, I’m at home, I’m having a good time,” he says in the video. “If I’m honest, I don’t want to leave.” For the design team, his decision not to bring the tour to the mainland United States meant a rare chance to work in Puerto Rico for several months. It also allowed them to honor the beauty of their homeland through their craft. In English, “no me quiero ir de aquí” translates to “I don’t want to leave here.” Every level of the production embodied that message, from the hand-painted flowers on the mountain to the deliberately dirty roof of la casita. The stages will stand through Saturday, September 20, when Bad Bunny will perform an additional livestreamed show, dubbed “Una Más,” on the anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico.
A Vision in Two Parts
In late January, Puerto Rican production designer Mónica Monserrate received a call from Sturdy, the design agency who collaborated with Bad Bunny on the larger vision for the residency. They approached her with an idea for the concert’s main stage, and for Monserrate, it hit close to home. “The request was, we want a piece of a mountain with that nostalgic feeling that most [Puerto Ricans] who don’t live in Puerto Rico have all the time,” she says.
The mountain of Cerro Mime and the mountainside town of Adjuntas, in the Cordillera Central, served as inspirations for her first concept drawings. The landscapes contain round, uneven forms, which is exactly what the superstar envisioned. “He wanted an asymmetrical mountain,” Monserrate says. “He didn’t want the right side to be similar to the left, which is why only one side has the wood trail markers, and why the trails are different. When you look at it, you see different vegetation on each side.”
Production designer Mayna Magruder led plans for la casita. She worked with art director Natalia Rosa to tackle the challenge of replicating a real house in Humacao, Puerto Rico, which Bad Bunny used in the short film released in conjunction with Debí Tirar Más Fotos. “In our first meeting, [Bad Bunny’s team] described their needs for la casita as a set—that [Bad Bunny] would be able to go on the roof, that the roof could become a stage B,” Rosa says. “It was a process of brainstorming with [Pérez] for how we could create a secure structure, what structural elements we could add to the design without losing the essence of the house, and how we could create a façade that would make people say, ‘Wow, that reminds me of my grandma’s house.’”
(On September 17, Román Carrasco Delgado, the owner of the house in Humacao, filed a lawsuit against Bad Bunny and three companies involved in the residency. The lawsuit alleges that the stage model of his house was created without his consent. Bad Bunny’s team did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
Creating Mountains—and Moving Them
By mid February, with concepts for both stages approved, Monserrate recruited Gabriela Escalera, a Puerto Rican architect and cofounder of New York City design studio Gaby&Ruben, to bring the mountain to life in three dimensions. Escalera had two main priorities: to envision a structurally sound stage for the musicians and dancers, and to stick to Monserrate’s creative vision. “My job was to take that idea, that inspiration, and bring it to life, model it and sculpt it on my computer in a way that could be constructed with scaffolding, with lights, with access points—and that could be broken down into pieces, so it could be constructed in one place, deconstructed, and transported to El Choli,” she says, using the nickname for San Juan’s El Coliseo. “When things were moving and logistics came up, for me, there was an exercise of closing my eyes and imagining the mountains, understanding the curves. Breaking it down into pieces wasn’t the hardest part. It was sticking to the idea you want to communicate.”
For the decorative aspect of the mountain, Monserrate collaborated with lead scenic painter Alejandra Martínez to emulate icons of Puerto Rican wildlife—like plantain trees, daisies, and a flamboyán, or “flame tree”—while making space for a 30-foot, billboard-style screen made from custom LED mesh. Before the show, the screen displayed facts about Puerto Rico, for example, that “Puerto Rico is an archipelago, not just an island.” Once Bad Bunny’s ensemble took the stage, it projected them within the mountain’s sprawling grasses and trails of wildflowers, reminiscent of the ones found along the streets of San Juan. “They’re all artificial plants, and we had to touch each and every one of those for them to feel real,” Monserrate says. A cluster of plantain trees at the mountain’s left contained natural elements, which she executed with help from her nephew, an agronomer. “He and I took a trip to a plantain field to get some references and photos, and we figured out that we could cut the peel of the plantain and it would stay together when you took the plantain out. [Martínez] found a way to preserve that, at least for the residency period. All the dry leaves are real too. They were all treated with glue and fire retardant.”
“Wow, That’s the Roof on My House”
In creating la casita, Magruder and Rosa aspired to do more than imitate a house at a concert-friendly scale. They wanted to evoke a sentimentality in those who call Puerto Rico home. “Many people are saying it reminds them of their grandparents’ house, or the house they grew up in,” Rosa says. “It plays on nostalgia and memories, and all the happiness those memories bring.” La casita echoes many of Puerto Rico’s longest-standing homes, built from concrete and cement to withstand the tropical climate. Magruder, Rosa, and Pérez managed to achieve an equally sturdy look from metal, wood, and foam.
La casita’s pink exterior and rattan patio furniture charmed audiences, but its roof stole the show. Its flat, gray surface stood devoid of decorations, save for an air conditioner condenser that could have been plucked from the 1980s. Midway through every show, Bad Bunny climbed on top to perform hits like “Eoo,” the backtrack to his Calvin Klein underwear ad. Suddenly, an unassuming, concrete-like slab became the center of attention within an arena full of spectacle. “When you arrive in El Choli and see la casita, if you’re in the higher seats, what you see is the roof,” Rosa says. “We needed people to see the roof and say, ‘Wow, that’s the roof on my house,’ or ‘That needs a pressure wash; it’s dirty-looking.’” According to Rosa, the request for a dingy-looking roof came from Bad Bunny himself.
“No me quiero ir de aquí”
“No me quiero ir de aquí” is projected to generate $200 million in revenue. For its stage designers, time is now separated into two eras, before the residency and after. “My family, they do not understand architecture, they do not understand design, but this, they understand,” Escalera says. She’s one of 5.8 million Puerto Ricans living in the continental US, but she carries Puerto Rico with her everywhere. She describes her work on this project as “coming back home through the mountain.”
In one of the show’s most beloved moments, Bad Bunny sat beneath a flamboyán tree at the right edge of the mountain. Monserrate, Martínez, and the team painted its striking scarlet flowers by hand. “We found this one specific flower from a vendor, and it didn’t have the correct color,” Monserrate says. “So we got silkscreen paints, mixed them to get that orange, and painted each flower. Each one of those flowers had a yellow dot, and that was all done by hand.” Search “flamboyán” on TikTok, and you’ll find countless videos from Puerto Ricans explaining its importance as a symbol of home. Beneath the tree’s shade, Bad Bunny sang a medley of early songs and turned back into Benito, a creative kid from Vega Baja who would go on to change the world.
“I believe in Puerto Rico, and I want the situation here to improve, for those with so much intelligence and talent to not have to leave the island just to survive,” Monserrate says. “I’m really hopeful that this will bring more to this island and to the conscience of the people here and outside. We are so capable of creating so much.”
Rosa notes that a project of this scale has never been realized by an all-Puerto-Rican design team, let alone one led by women. “It’s a beautiful feeling,’” she says. “Benito has shown the world that there’s so much talent in Puerto Rico.”
