Araya Vlogs won a Premio Juventud — and opened a door for a whole generation of Costa Rican creators

On the night of Thursday, 3 September 2026, at the Starlite Auditorium in Marbella, Spain, the name read out belonged to a YouTube channel that started in 2019 in Muelle de San Carlos, Costa Rica, shot on a phone. Araya Vlogs won the Premio Juventud in the #ModoAvión category, the award for Spanish-language travel and lifestyle creators.

Christopher Araya Jiménez took the stage and said what a lot of people watching from Costa Rica were probably thinking:

The last thing I could have imagined seven years ago, when I started making content in a tiny town in Costa Rica, was being surrounded by people this talented.

Christopher Araya, accepting the award

He closed by thanking, as reported by La Nación and Teletica, "God, and my unconditional people in Costa Rica and everywhere in the world".

He won as the smallest channel in the category

This is the part of the story you cannot skip past.

In #ModoAvión, Araya was up against creators from far bigger markets with far bigger audiences than his:

• Plex, from Spain, with around 14.9 million YouTube subscribers — nearly four times his channel
• Alejandra Travels, from Colombia
• Hola Soy Natasha, from Mexico
• Roberta con Maleta, from Mexico

Araya walked into that category with roughly 3.94 million YouTube subscribers and about one million Instagram followers. On paper, he was the smallest name on the list. He won anyway.

That matters, because it takes apart the idea that makes most creators quit before they start: that size decides. It did not. What decided was seven years of publishing video after video about places almost nobody was covering in Spanish — Cape Verde, India, Malaysia, Kenya, more than twenty-five countries — with a point of view you recognise within three seconds.

He started the way everyone starts

In 2019, Araya had no crew, no producer and no sponsors. He had a phone and a town in San Carlos. The distance between that and a stage in Marbella was not closed by luck. It was closed by publishing.

That is the fact worth repeating to any Costa Rican creator sitting on 200 subscribers and thinking about stopping. Araya's starting point was worse than yours: today you have a better camera in your pocket, better editing tools for free, and a Latin American audience that is already used to watching creators from the region.

What he had, and what you need, is persistence and a voice that does not sound like anyone else's.

What this award means for the Costa Rican community

Costa Rica is a country of five million people competing for attention against markets of a hundred million. Every time a Costa Rican wins something like this, something concrete happens: the next brand building a regional campaign stops asking whether Costa Rica has creators at that level. It already knows.

That ceiling just moved for everyone, not only for him. It is one of the few wins that genuinely gets shared out.

Our goal, said plainly

qcrew exists for one reason: so that every creator in Costa Rica reaches the audience that is already out there looking for them.

There is not just one possible Araya. There are hundreds of people filming right now in Guanacaste, in Limón, in Pérez Zeledón, in San Carlos, with the same persistence he had in 2019 and nobody finding them. The distance between a 300-subscriber channel and a stage in Marbella is not talent. It is visibility, and it is time.

We handle the first one. The second one is on you.

One Costa Rican doing it stops being an exception the moment the second one does. Let's go get that second one.