Lenny Santana is a Dominican bachata singer and songwriter who works out of Gijón, in Asturias. He began in urbano and reggaetón and moved to bachata, which is the less usual direction of travel.

Bachata from the north of Spain

Asturias is not where anyone expects to find a Dominican bachatero. It is a cold, green, industrial corner of Spain with a long history of receiving migrants rather than sending them, and the Dominican community there is small enough that a working singer has to make his living partly outside it.

That shows in the material. He wrote Gijón del Alma and cut it as a bachata — a song for the Spanish city, in a Dominican rhythm, which is a fairly precise description of the position he occupies.

The records

Estrellita is the one his own audience asks for. Vuelve Junto a Mí, from 2022, was made with Sandro Reyes, another Dominican bachatero who works the same European circuit; the two of them have kept turning up on each other’s sessions since.

A Primera Vista and Dama de Otro followed, along with a bachata reading of Señora de las Cuatro Décadas. Covering a Ricardo Montaner ballad as a bachata is standard practice in the genre and always has been: bachata has absorbed the Latin American romantic songbook for fifty years and given it back with a requinto on top.

Nothing else about him is documented — no date of birth, and no town in the Dominican Republic, only the country.