Spring has lasted less than expected in the Spanish capital, which aspired to become a new venue for the veteran music festival, adding to the existing ones in Barcelona and Porto. After a single edition marked by weather problems and the difficulties caused by the location of the venue more than 30 kilometers from the city center, the Primavera Sound organization announced this Friday that it is renouncing to repeat next year.
“Despite the fact that the balance of the festival was more than satisfactory on a musical level, the expectations we had were not met,” explained Almudena Herrero, director of the Madrid edition, in a note released this Friday, pointing to logistical problems as the cause of this assessment. According to the organization, the city “does not have a venue capable of hosting an event of our magnitude and format with guarantees”, a problem that is currently unsolvable despite acknowledging that they have had the support of public institutions in the region.
This decision does not definitively close the door to holding the festival in Madrid in years to come, as Alfonso Lanza, director of Primavera Sound, points out, stating that “the will to continue this relationship exists on the part of all the parties involved”, and the relationship with the city “has only strengthened in recent months”. In this sense, he has valued the “lessons” that have been extracted from this first, and for now only, edition. “We don’t want to waste them in the future,” he remarked.
Primavera Sound Madrid was born as a result of the disagreement between the organization and the Barcelona City Council, given the intention of the former to consolidate a double edition in the Catalan capital, as they already did in 2022. Given the refusal of the consistory, the celebration for the following year, 2023, of a festival with the same line-up a week after the one in Barcelona. For this, the Ciudad del Rock venue was chosen, in Arganda del Rey, 35 km from the center of the capital, a space large enough to house the fifteen stages and the more than 65,000 attendees who this year attended the Parc del Fòrum to experience concerts by artists such as Blur, Depeche Mode, Kendrick Lamar or Rosalía.
The problems, however, arose from the first day with strong storms that prevented the assembly of the 12 stages and other festival facilities from being completed on time. The result was the suspension of the first day, which was to be held on Thursday, June 8, a bad start that affected the day on Friday, where attendees found numerous puddles and mud in the spaces that were to host the event.
Added to these climatic difficulties were transportation, centralized in a shuttle bus service that departed from the Wanda Metropolitano stadium and which took an hour and a half to cover the distance that separated them from the City of Rock, with particular problems in the last section of the venue, where the confluence of public transport and private vehicles, as well as parking problems, caused a collapse that led many people to get out of the vehicles and finish their journey on foot.
This situation caused a 45-minute delay in Depeche Mode’s performance, to allow people time to get to the concert. These difficulties with communication led the organization to recognize that, although the capacity of the Madrid venue was 85,000 people, taking into account mobility problems, it could not serve more than 50,000.
In total, there were 90,000 people who attended the Madrid edition of Primavera, 42,000 on the first day and 48,000 on Saturday, which included those who kept Thursday’s ticket in hand, who were given the chance to reuse it in the following days.
The cancellation of Primavera Sound comes in addition to that of the Reggaeton Beach Festival (RBF), which this weekend was to be held simultaneously in Madrid and Barcelona with more than 100,000 tickets sold between both locations. Finally, only the Catalan edition will be held after this Thursday the license for its celebration was denied by the City Council, alleging that “the adequate security or evacuation conditions are not guaranteed for an event of these characteristics.”
The urban music festival was to be held at the Iberdrola Music space, in the town of Getafe, the same one that recently hosted the Mad Cool festival and which had been considered as an alternative for future editions of Primavera Sound. However, the mayoress of the town, Sara Hernández, has stated that her intention is that “no other concert” be held in this space. This same week it was announced that the Barcelona edition of the RBF will take place next year at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, in Montmeló, leaving its current location in the Parc del Fòrum.
