It is the ideal setting for the Primavera Sound festival in Madrid, 380,000 square meters of open-air space that allows for more than a dozen stages without disturbing each other. But, at the same time, road access does not allow more than 50,000 people per day. And, in case of heavy rains, the ground becomes muddy. Result: the Primavera Sound festival will continue in Madrid in 2024 after celebrating the first edition that closes today, but its managers will evaluate the suitability of repeating in the City of Rock in Arganda del Rey, 30 kilometers from the capital. “The will is to continue in Madrid, we believe in Madrid and in the people of Madrid, from next week we are going to work for 2024. We will consider Arganda del Rey but we have to reflect on several issues together, and not only of the venue but of the festival in general “, said Almudena Heredero, director of Primavera Sound Madrid, at the press conference to balance the event.
A festival that had to cancel its first day, its debut in Arganda on Thursday, due to the heavy rains in recent weeks, which have made the assembly and reception processes suffer a lot, despite which the festival between yesterday and Friday and today, Saturday, it has managed to gather no less than 90,000 people. Some 42,000 on Friday, with Depeche Mode, Kendrick Lamar and Fred Again as some of the big hooks, and 48,000 more this Saturday in which the great attraction is RosalÃa. “There are issues that we have to evaluate in the future, such as mobility and the weather, because with water you suffer and it makes you suffer. Once we reflect, we will see, although this venue is ideal for the festival with capacity limitations and without inclement weather “Heir insisted.
On Friday, the shuttles that left from the Metropolitan Stadium to the Ciudad del Rock in Arganda del Rey took an hour and a half to travel just over 30 kilometers. Leaving the stadium was complicated, but, above all, it was the last stretch of arrival at the venue, where cars and buses were stopped for a long time, which caused some of the fans to leave the drivers in the cars and walk field by field. through to enter the City of Rock. The circulatory collapse led to the delay of the start of the Depeche Mode concert by 45 minutes so that more people could arrive.
Heir, satisfied with having managed to get the festival on its feet despite the extremely adverse weather circumstances, explained that “we already saw every day that the circumstances were complicated, affecting production and parking areas, which has generated a complication very serious, only 50% of the planned parking spaces could be enabled, and this lack of parking made it difficult to access the premises through the areas disabled by the rains”.
In a press conference together with the festival’s communication manager, Joan Pons, they recalled that if they initially thought of 85,000 people a day, soon with the mobility studies they saw that the maximum would be 50,000, so that the figures achieved border on the real possibilities from the City of Rock. “Expectations have been met, the public’s response has responded to what we expected. Now it’s time to sit down and reflect on what implications all this has,” they said. Time to think about what model they want and to gather the data from the edition to evaluate their next steps, they pointed out, remembering anyway that Primavera Sound Barcelona itself has been resized.
