| Tour by Santana | |
 | |
| Associated album | Caravanserai |
|---|---|
| Start date | September 4, 1972 |
| End date | October 21, 1973 |
| Legs | 7 |
| No. of shows | 90 in North America 25 in Europe 15 in Asia 12 in Oceania 12 in South America 154 in total (155 scheduled) |
| Santana concert chronology | |
The Caravanserai Tour was a series of performances by American Latin rock band Santana in support of their album Caravanserai during 1972 and 1973. It started on September 4, 1972, at the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival in Griffin, Indiana, and ended on October 21, 1973 at Ginasio Municipal Novo in Brasília, Brazil. This tour could be considered to be the group's most eclectic tour at this point, as the band did concerts at every continent except Africa and Antarctica, including one of the first, if not the first, tours of Latin America by a major American rock act.[1]
The tour was the first and only tour to feature the group's second lineup, "The New Santana Band", consisting of guitarist Carlos Santana, percussionists Armando Peraza and José Areas, bassist Doug Rauch, drummer Michael Shrieve, and Tom Coster and Richard Kermode on keyboards. The group often performed material from Caravanserai along with other improvisations and covers.
Some concerts were recorded and filmed and released as albums and films. The shows on July 3 and 4, 1973 at the Osaka Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan in Osaka, Japan were released as the triple vinyl LP Lotus (1974). Select concerts during the tour's Latin American portion were filmed and incorporated into the documentary, Santana en Colores (1973).