Sziget Festival

Sziget Festival is held every August in northern Budapest, Hungary. It was ranked one of the 5 best festivals in Europe by The Independent in 2011, and won the European Festivals Awards in the category Best Major European Festival twice, in 2011 and 2014.

Being one of the largest music and cultural festivals in Europe, Sziget Festival is held for a week-long and attracts visitors from even outside Hungary, especially from Western Europe, but its start was quite humble. The festival started off as a relatively low-profile student event in 1993. After years went by, more and more artists perform at the festival, making more people interested in visiting it. In the last few years, more than 1,000 performances are prepared each year, and the total attendance changed rapidly, surpassing the 250,000 mark in 1997, reaching the 440,000 mark in 2016, and making history with 565,000 visitors attending the festival in 2019.

Sziget Festival is famous for having unique features including "an electronically amplified, warped amusement park that has nothing to do with reality". For this reason, it is labeled as a European alternative to the Burning Man festival ever since the mid-2000s. The festival also has a dedicated "party train" service that transports festival-goers from all over Europe.

Genre: Rock, alternative rock, psychedelic rock, punk rock, heavy metal, pop, synthpop, reggae, hip hop, indie, world, electronic
Dates: Seven days, usually starting in the first week of August
Location(s): Budapest, Hungary
Website: sziget.hu