With practically 10,000 tickets sold, the first edition of the Idílic Festival kicks off today in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, which will bring together consolidated artists such as Melendi or La Casa Azul, the group led by Guille Mikyway, and other names on the stage of the Guíxols Arena. the music scene of the moment like Dani Fernández and his band or the Venezuelan singer Danny Ocean, one of the most listened to Latin artists today.
It is the first edition of a contest that was created with the aim of being a “reference” in the summer of the Costa Brava, the epicenter during the summer months of a multitude of musical events. However, its birth has not been without controversy since two weeks after its start, its organizers were forced to change the location.
The place initially chosen was Platja d’Aro, the Espai Masia Bas, located in the center of the city, through which some 12,000 people were expected to pass during the two days of the event. The Consistory gave up the space as long as the municipal technical reports, from the Mossos d’Esquadra and Bombers were favorable to this great musical event.
Sources from the Platja d’Aro City Council point out that when in 2022 the promoting company Here Comes The Sound SL maintained the first contacts with the Consistory for the celebration of the contest, the date chosen was another, at the end of June.
A year later, always according to municipal sources, it was modified and placed by the end of July, a time when Platja d’Aro could reach 120,000 people, a figure that multiplies the number of registered residents tenfold.
“The change of dates was the grace and at the same time its misfortune”, they affirm from the Platja d’Aro City Council. The volume of people that mobilized the festival in the middle of the tourist season and that it was in a place as central as the one where this great musical event was to be held have conditioned its celebration.
According to the Platja d’Aro City Council, all the reports except the one from the Fire Department, which established a series of conditions, were negative. The extraordinary activities license and acoustic map were denied by the municipal technical services, as well as the reports on urban mobility from the Local Police and on interurban mobility and citizen security from the Mossos d’Esquadra.
The City Council communicated this to the promoters on May 31 and June 7, who presented new documentation that, once reviewed, was again negative. It happened at the end of June, a month before the celebration of the Idyllic Festival, and although the organization filed an appeal for replacement, the City Council reaffirmed its refusal to allow its celebration.
The festival is moved a few kilometers from the original location, in the Guíxols Arena in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, a specific facility for holding major musical events and which hosts, among others, the oldest festival of Catalonia, the Porta Ferrada festival .
It is a space with capacity for 8,000 people, although the municipal self-protection plan limits equipment to a maximum of 5,000. From this capacity it is the Generalitat who must give the permits, which would have delayed the procedures.
In this sense, as explained by the mayor of Culture of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Josep Saballs, the festival has had to make some changes such as reducing the volume of tickets that it planned to sell and limiting the closing hours of the space, which will not exceed two o’cloc after midnight. Some shuttle buses will transport the public who had already planned to stay in Platja d’Aro to Sant Feliu de Guíxols.
