Spring has lasted less than expected in the capital of Spain, which aspired to become a new venue for the veteran Primavera Sound music festival, adding to the existing ones in Barcelona and Porto. After a single edition marked by climate problems and the difficulties caused by the location of the venue, more than 30 kilometers from the city center, the organization announced yesterday that it will not repeat next year. “Although the balance of the festival was more than satisfactory in terms of music, 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 with guarantees an event of our magnitude and format”, a problem that is currently unsolvable, despite acknowledging that they have received the support of public institutions in the region.
This decision does not definitively close the door to holding the festival in Madrid for years to come, as pointed out by Alfonso Lanza, director of Primavera Sound, who affirms that “the will to continue this relationship by all the parties involved exists”, and the relationship with the city “has only gotten closer in recent months”. In this sense, he has valued the “lessons” that have been taken from this first and, for now, only edition. “We don’t want to waste them for the future”, he remarked.
Primavera Sound Madrid was born as a result of the disagreement between the organization and the Barcelona City Council regarding the intention of the former to consolidate a double edition in the Catalan capital, as they already did in 2022. Given the Council’s refusal, it was announced that a festival with the same poster would be held for the following year, 2023, a week after the Barcelona one. That is why the venue of the Ciudad del Rock, in Arganda del Rey, 35 km from the center of the capital, was chosen, a space large enough to accommodate the fifteen stages and the many expected attendees (more than 65,000 people went daily, that same year, to Barcelona’s Parc del Fòrum to experience the concerts of artists such as Blur, Depeche Mode, Kendrick Lamar and Rosalía).
Problems, however, arrived from the first day with strong storms that prevented the installation of the 12 stages and other festival facilities from being finished on time. The result was the suspension of the first day, which had to be held on Thursday, June 8, a bad start that affected the day on Friday, when the attendees found themselves with a lot of puddles and mud in the spaces that were to host the event.
To these climatic difficulties were added those of transport, centralized in a shuttle bus service that left the Wanda Metropolitano stadium and that took an hour and a half to cover the distance that separated them from the Ciudad del Rock, with particular problems in the last section of the site, where the confluence of public transport and private vehicles, and also parking problems, caused a collapse that made many people choose to get out of their vehicles and finish the route on foot. The situation caused a 45-minute delay in Depeche Mode’s performance, to allow people time to get to the concert. These difficulties with communications led the organization to recognize that, although the capacity of the Madrid venue was 85,000 people, taking into account the mobility problems, no more than 50,000 could be attended to.
In total, 90,000 people went to the Madrid edition of Primavera, 42,000 on the first day and 48,000 on Saturday (half of what had been planned), which included those who kept the Thursday ticket in hand, who were given the possibility to use it again in the following days.
The cancellation of Primavera Sound is added 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 the two locations. Finally, only the Catalan edition will take place after the Madrid City Council refused the license this Thursday, claiming that “the security and evacuation conditions are not guaranteed for an event of this nature”.
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 studied as an alternative for future editions of Primavera Sound. Despite this, the mayor 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 be held from 2024 at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, in Montmeló, far from its current location at the Forum.
