Europe 8 rooms
Bregenz Festival Lake Stage (Seebühne)
A stage built on the water of Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria, where the Bregenz Festival stages opera each summer.
Meadows in the Mountains
Boutique festival above the village of Polkovnik Serafimovo in Bulgaria's Rhodope mountains, with a Sunrise Stage facing east over the valley. It ran from 2011 to 2023 and has now ended.
Dimensions Festival
A six-day house, techno, soul, disco and dub festival at The Garden, a beach resort on the Adriatic at Tisno, halfway between Split and Zadar.
Arena di Verona
The Arena di Verona is a Roman amphitheatre on Piazza Bra in the centre of Verona, completed around AD 30 and among the best-preserved of its kind.
Volcano Extravaganza
The Fiorucci Art Trust's summer festival of contemporary art, performance and music on Stromboli, the active volcano in Italy's Aeolian Islands.
Sunwaves Festival
Sunwaves grew up on the sand at Mamaia on Romania's Black Sea coast. The Romanian editions ended in May 2025 and the festival now runs abroad.
Butik Festival (Tolmin, Soča River)
Butik is the boutique electronic festival at Sotočje, the confluence of the Soča and Tolminka rivers in the Slovenian Julian Alps.
Sajeta Festival
Slovenia's longest-running festival at the Soča/Tolminka river confluence in Tolmin. Since 1998.
Africa 15 rooms
Festival of Ahaggar Arts
An annual Algerian state-backed festival in the Hoggar mountain capital of Tamanrasset, dedicated to Tuareg and trans-Saharan music with participants from Mali, Niger, Libya and Mauritania.
Vodun Days Festival
Held annually on 10 January (National Vodun Day) in Ouidah, the spiritual capital of Vodun on the coast of Benin. Drumming circles, masked Egungun processions, ceremonial dance.
MTN Bushfire Festival
Three-day Pan-African music, theatre and arts festival at the House on Fire venue in the Malkerns Valley, 23km from Mbabane. Up to 20,000 attendees annually each May.
Beneath the Baobabs
Beneath the Baobabs, the New Year festival formerly known as Kilifi New Year: three days and nights of house, Afro house and experimental music in a baobab grove on Kenya's Indian Ocean…
Lake Turkana Cultural Festival
Annual June festival in Loiyangalani on the south-eastern shore of Lake Turkana, the world's largest desert lake.
Lake of Stars Festival
Africa's most spellbinding gathering, unfolding on the shores of Lake Malawi where sand, water and rhythm melt into one. Since 2004, a cornerstone of African creative culture.
Festival sur le Niger
An annual February festival on the banks of the Niger River at Ségou, with a high-tech main stage built on a docked barge.
Fes Festival of World Sacred Music
Founded 1994, programmes Sufi brotherhoods, Andalusian orchestras, Indian classical, gospel and Tibetan chant across a week each June.
Gnaoua and World Music Festival
The Gnaoua and World Music Festival takes place in Essaouira, the walled Atlantic port city of Morocco whose medina was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.
AfrikaBurn
South Africa's regional Burning Man event, held annually in late April on Quaggafontein, a remote family ranch in the Tankwa Karoo about 280km north of Cape Town.
Sauti za Busara
An annual Pan-African music festival in Zanzibar's Stone Town. After years at the Old Fort, the 2026 edition moved to the Mnazi Mmoja Grounds.
Sunwaves Zanzibar
Sunwaves Zanzibar took the Sunwaves Festival to Dongwe Beach on Zanzibar, first announced in June 2021. Whether it still runs each November is not confirmed.
El Jem International Symphonic Festival
Held every July and August since 1985 inside the El Jem Roman amphitheatre, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the third-largest amphitheatre in the world after Rome and Capua.
Nyege Nyege Festival
Pan-African avant-music festival on the Nile with seven stages in 2026 and river adventures.
The Jazz Safari
Uganda's soulful gathering of world-class musicians. A continent-wide conversation told through rhythm, every September across rooftops and terraces of Kampala.
Asia 10 rooms
YinYang Music Festival (Great Wall)
YinYang Music Festival is an electronic music festival on the Huangyaguan section of the Great Wall, founded in 2014.
Clockenflap Festival
Three-day festival on the Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong, 4 to 6 December 2026, with the Hong Kong Island skyline behind the stages.
Magnetic Fields Festival
Three days inside a 17th-century Rajasthani palace. The courtyards become stages, the ramparts become viewing platforms, peacocks walk the lineup. It runs each December.
Mehrangarh Fort
Mehrangarh is a fort founded in 1459 by Rao Jodha, rising about 122 metres above the plains of Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Managed by the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, it is also a concert venue.
Ziro Festival of Music
Four days in the Ziro Valley of Arunachal Pradesh. Open-field stages, indigenous Apatani village hosting, terraced rice paddies as backdrop. September.
Fuji Rock Festival
Three days at the Naeba ski resort in the Echigo mountains. The Green Stage backs onto a river, forest stages wind through actual woodland. Asia's flagship destination festival since 1997.
Medaina Festival, Petra and Wadi Rum
Medaina is an electronic music festival across two of Jordan's landscapes: Petra, opening at Little Petra, and the red desert of Wadi Rum.
Baalbeck International Festival
The Baalbeck International Festival stages opera, orchestral music, ballet, theatre, jazz and Arabic song among the Roman temples of Baalbek, in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, with the steps of…
Playtime Festival
Mongolia's flagship music festival, held since 2024 at Playtime Field in Nalaikh, about 50 km from Ulaanbaatar (Gachuurt Valley, 2009 to 2023). Three days each July.
Wonderfruit Festival
Five days on the Fields at Siam Country Club outside Pattaya. Bamboo-architecture stages, sustainability ethos, programming closer to Burning Man than EDM.
Americas 3 rooms
Zamna Tulum
Eight-week-long jungle festival series in the Yucatán, Dec-Feb. Cenote-blue lighting, Mayan-stone-stage references, the post-2018 Tulum melodic techno blueprint.
Burning Man
A temporary city of about 71,500 people on the Black Rock Desert playa in Nevada, built and burned each year. The next edition, Spellbound, runs 29 August to 6 September 2027.
Newport Jazz Festival at Fort Adams
George Wein's 1954 jazz festival, the world's first, held inside the granite ramparts of an 1841 coastal artillery fort overlooking Narragansett Bay.
Oceania 8 rooms
Bluesfest Byron Bay
Easter-weekend festival on the Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm, 11 km north of Byron Bay. Six big-top tents in rolling pasture, Pacific paddock-away.
Dark Mofo (MONA Hobart)
Two-week midwinter festival at David Walsh's MONA museum, June each year. Subterranean Berriedale gallery becomes the engine room for ritualised noise, fire, and ceremonial swimming.
Rainbow Spirit Festival
Rainbow Spirit Festival, formerly Rainbow Serpent Festival, is an electronic music and arts festival founded in 1998 in Victoria, Australia. Renamed in July 2023.
WOMADelaide
Annual world-music festival in Botanic Park since 1992. Stages spread under 200-year-old Moreton Bay figs whose buttress roots make natural amphitheatres. Four days every March.
Splore Festival
Three-day boutique festival in February on Tāpapakanga Regional Park, a Hauraki Gulf beach 75 km east of Auckland. 8,000 attendees under ancient pōhutukawa trees.
WOMAD Aotearoa (Bowl of Brooklands)
Three-day world-music festival every March at the Bowl of Brooklands, a natural amphitheatre carved into native bush in Pukekura Park.
Merrie Monarch Festival
Most prestigious hula competition in the world. Annual since 1964 the week after Easter, in honour of King David Kalākaua.
Fest'Napuan
Pacific's longest-running music festival since 1996. Four days every October at Saralana Park in central Port Vila. Free admission.