Roskilde Festival
The Roskilde Festival is an annual Danish music festival held south of Roskilde. It is one of Europe's largest music festivals, as well as the largest in the Nordics. Two high school students and a promoter founded it in 1971. The festival was taken over by the Roskilde Foundation in 1972, and it has since been run as a non-profit organization for the development and support of music, culture, and humanism. In 2014, the Roskilde Foundation gave festivalgoers the opportunity to nominate and vote on which organizations should receive festival funds.
The Roskilde Festival was Denmark's first music-oriented festival, created for hippies, and it now attracts a wider range of young people from Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. The majority of festival attendees are Danes, but there are also many visitors from other countries, particularly other Scandinavian countries and Germany.
Roskilde Festival's bands are typically a well-balanced mix of large, well-known artists, cutting-edge artists from all contemporary genres, popular crowd-pleasing acts, as well as local Scandinavian headliners and up-and-coming names. Rock, Hip Hop, Metal, Urban, Electronica, and Third World Contemporary Music are among the genres represented. On the first day of the festival, it has become customary to have a Danish act open the Orange Stage. There are frequently unexpected performances by classical acts, film music, opera, and so on.
The festival campsite spans nearly 80 hectares (200 acres) and is included in the ticket price. It usually opens on Sunday morning, just before the festival. Aside from the small and distinct Camping South, it is divided into two areas, East and West, each with a service center and establishments ranging from food stalls to a cinema. The campsite is further subdivided into 'agoras,' which offer toilets, phone charging, and luggage storage. They also host events based on the theme of each agora.
A new gate system was installed in 2018. This means that the first seven rows of the gate system are occupied by all guests who arrive first (1000 people in each). A large field behind this holds all of the remaining guests. The gates open at 16:00 on the first Saturday, one row at a time at approximately 90-second intervals. When this is finished, the remaining guests in the back area will be able to enter the camping area. The concert venues do not open until the following day.
Roskilde Festival Radio has organized a naked run in a fenced-in track around the campsite every year since 1999, on the Saturday of the festival (held on a Thursday in 2015, 2016, and 2017). One male and one female winner will each receive a ticket to the festival the following year. As a result, the run has become a very popular and "legendary" part of the festival.
Where: Roskilde, Denmark
When: Four days, starting from first Wednesday in July, or last Wednesday in June with a 4-day warm-up
