Another success for Marbella singer

A Marbella youngster is celebrating after winning a singing competition on Japanese TV.

Charlotte Summers won first place on the show by singing "I Was Born to Love You" by Freddie Mercury last month.

Representing Spain - she competed against a host of child singers on the prime time TV show called Fujiyama on Fuji TV.

In addition, the 13-year-old has also just made another appearance on the holiday special of the American TV show Little Big Shots.

As reported in SUR in English last May, Charlotte previously appeared on Little Big Shots, after a video clip of her singing in Marbella went viral and caught the attention of the show's bosses. Before that, she sang on Spanish TV show La Voz Kids at the age of nine, where she reached the semi-finals.

Charlotte, who goes to school at Las Chapas in El Rosario, told SUR in English: "I feel very excited and I was delighted about how my performance went. Singing in another country, against the best from that country was quite a challenge. I felt very honoured that the public enjoyed it so much and voted for me."

Charlotte, who was born in Spain and has an English father and Spanish mother, started singing at the age of six in school plays and got her first big break singing in Les Miserables at the Teatro Cervantes in Malaga.

Her father, Simon Summers, 49, who works in real estate, explained how she ended up getting her big break after getting her hair cut in La Cañada shopping centre, Marbella.

He said: "One of the hairdressers asked her to sing something, as she recognised her from La Voz Kids. She sang a bit of a song that she had specially recorded for a competition, called Unicorn, and the hairdresser uploaded it. It went viral and has been seen by more than 20 million people worldwide. We were contacted by the producers of Little Big Shots who had seen the video and realised how good she is."