8 Reasons Why You Should Visit Denmark's Roskilde Festival This Summer

Roskilde Festival is one of the largest music and culture festivals in Europe and the largest in Northern Europe. It’s estimated that this year 130,000 festival-goers will attend Roskilde Festival either for the whole eight-day experience or for fewer days with one-day tickets. Spending eight days surrounded by 130,000 people that like music, partying and beer is like living in a dream city (which, by the way, would be the 4th-largest in Denmark).

When Roskilde Festival announced this year’s line-up it was sure to be sold out. Once again, the Danish festival brings a top line-up with bands of every music genre and huge headliners. The stars of this year’s festival will be Eminem, Gorillaz, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nine Inch Nails and Dua Lipa, among others. In other words, the world’s highest-paid rapper, one of the most discussed dance-electro duos, a legend of rock, one of the most influential bands of the 90s and the most successful pop-singer of the year. Not bad, right? And these are only five of the 175 acts of the festival.

Roskilde isn’t only known for its internationally known headliners but also for hosting upcoming artists from Scandinavia and other countries. Many Nordic singers and bands that are quite popular nowadays, such as MØ and Iceage, performed on Roskilde Festival’s stages Countdown and Rising when they were in the first steps of their career. Each one of these stages fit 5,000 visitors and, trust us, they’re always packed with music devotees eager to discover new artists.

Roskilde Festival isn’t only about music. Throughout the eight days of the festival, Art Zone displays artwork while performances, talks, debates and other activities take place at the Flokkr area. Take a break from partying and get involved in the ‘Value of Art’ debate or ‘What is Money’ discussion. Chelsea Manning is one of the guests invited to this year’s festival to talk about activism while at the KlubRÅ stage concerts, poetry, installations and DJ sets will be taking place all day long.

Since 1971 that Roskilde Festival took place for the first time some of the biggest names of the music scene have performed live at the Danish festival’s stages. However, that’s only one of the reasons Roskilde Festival has earned a place in music lovers’ hearts and attracts thousands of festival-goers. It’s the great vibe both at the concerts and at the camping site that make people come back to Denmark for the festival. Last year, 7% of the participants had been to the festival more than 10 times. That’s approximately 9,000 people, not counting the volunteers.

Whether you’ll set your tent at the festival’s campsite for the whole eight days or for just a few, chances are that when you leave Denmark you’ll have a bunch of new friends from all around the world. Roskilde Festival attracts people of every age, nationality and style but the average age of visitors is 24 years old. So, millennials, you just got another reason to add Roskilde Festival 2018 to your bucket list.

Even though that’s probably obvious, we thought it’s necessary to emphasize. You’re going to party all day long for more than a week! You’ll wake up and sleep under the sound of music, the smell of beer and roasted sausages and be surrounded by people your age. What more to ask for your summer holidays?

In case partying all day long and sleeping in a tent isn’t exactly your thing but you still want to watch your favourite band performing onstage, then Roskilde Festival should definitely be in your bucket list. Why? Simply because it takes place in the homonymous city, which is only 30 minutes away from Copenhagen. So if at the end of the day you want to take a warm shower in a comfy accommodation and then head back to the festival the next morning for another day full of music, you can do just that. You only have to grab the train and in less than an hour be at your destination.