Before Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 he struck up an unlikely friendship with a leading rival for the title of greatest Colombian. “We were pretty close friends,” Shakira says. “We started with an interview, just like the one you and I are doing, in his house, and that was the seed for a friendship.” The Nobel-winning novelist wrote of the singer’s “innocent sensuality”; would he also have recognised a touch of his trademark magic realism in her bonkers existence? She smiles. “Yes, there’s definitely a little bit of magic realism — and surrealism — in my life. Extreme sensibility and a little bit of drama.”
A little bit? The 47-year-old “queen of Latin music” is the most streamed female Latin artist in history; the
