Planning international travel in the next 12 months? consider including one of your chosen region’s famous music/arts/cultural festivals on your itinerary.
USA – New Orleans ‘Mardi Gras’
The city of New Orleans – nicknamed ‘The Big Easy’ – sits on the Mississippi River, near the Gulf of Mexico, in the US south- eastern state of Louisiana. Founded in 1718 by French colonists, New Orleans was capital of French Louisiana before becoming part of the USA with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
Modern New Orleans is renowned for its round-the-clock nightlife, distinctive live music scene and spicy/unique Creole cuisine reflecting its history as a melting pot of French, African and American cultures.
Mardi Gras is French for ‘Fat Tuesday’; hence the city’s internationally famous Mardi Gras carnival is a late-winter celebration concentrated in the fortnight leading up to its climax on ‘Shrove Tuesday’ (the day before ‘Ash Wednesday’, start of Lent for Christians). Mardi Gras 2026 is Tuesday, February 17. A recent study estimated Mardi Gras brings 1.4 million annual visitors to New Orleans.
Through the flamboyant fortnight (usually falling late January/early February), many of the city’s historic social clubs (known as ‘krewes’) hold glittering celebration balls – some are dazzling masquerade balls. Then as Fat Tuesday approaches, the public parades (organised in spirited competition by individual krewes) start in earnest – usually there is one major parade each day (weather permitting) and many days have several large parades – with the largest and most elaborate parades in the last five days of the Mardi Gras season.
Mardi Gras’s glittering costume parades – most krewes follow the same parade schedule and route each year, and many feature celebrity guests – and accompanying raucous street parties are especially concentrated around the historic heart of the city in the French quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along vivacious Bourbon Street. While many tourists concentrate their Carnival season activities in Bourbon Street, major parades also originate in the Uptown and Mid-City districts and follow a route along St Charles Avenue and Canal Street on the upriver side of the French Quarter.
Float riders, often blowing loud horns, traditionally toss ‘throws’ into the street-side crowds; the most common ‘throws’ are strings of multi-coloured plastic beads, doubloons (large coins, either wood or metal, made in official Mardi Gras colours of purple, green and gold), decorated plastic ‘throw cups’ and small inexpensive toys. One of the most famous and sought-after throws is a ‘Zulu Coconut’ (also known as a Golden Nugget and Mardi Gras Coconut) thrown by members of the local Zulu Krewe – either painted gold with added glitter or painted like the famous black Zulu faces; since 1988, the city forbade Zulu Krewe from throwing coconuts due to the injury risk and they are now handed to onlookers rather than thrown.
Walking parades also take place downtown in the Faubourg Marigny (a district known for its Cajun bistros, bohemian bars and jazz clubs) and French Quarter on the weekends preceding Mardi Gras Day/Shrove Tuesday – which can fall on any Tuesday between February 3 and March 9 (depending on the date of Easter and Ash Wednesday).
Spain – Valencia ‘Las Fallas’
Las Fallas – declared ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ by UNESCO – combines traditional art and religious celebrations in an annual festival from 1-19 March to mark the coming of Spring in the city of Valencia, on Spain’s eastern Mediterranean coast.
Fallas is the name given to the 800+ huge wooden, cardboard and papier-mache sculptures (fallero mounments) erected in streets and squares all over the city. Each falla follows a theme and consists of numerous individual sculptures (giant caricature dolls called ‘ninots’) – telling their own story, often depicting politicians and other well- known figures or critiques of current affairs, but with a dose of humour, satire and creativity.
The fallas are admired daily by large crowds appreciating their creativity and artistic merits, before they ‘succumb to the flames’ amid a deafening display of fireworks in spectacular bonfires set alight by members of competing groups (Fallas committees called ‘falleros’) during the Crema (burning of the monuments) on the final night March 19.
Each Fallero spends the previous year creating its giant fallas and ninots, which in some cases cost millions of euros; all are submitted for judgement in the hope their creations will be saved from the fire, despite the fact only two are given a reprieve each year by popular vote. In addition to the large, spectacular fallas, there are also children’s fallas (much smaller in size, designed by and for the juniors).
The origins of the festival go back to the tradition of improvising bonfires with old furniture to celebrate the arrival of Spring, which also coincides with the celebration of St Joseph’s Day, the patron saint of carpenters.
Festival events begin on the last Sunday in February with the Crida, in which the falleras’ mayors call for citizens to have fun at the Fallas; then from March 1-19 the Mascleta, a pyrotechnic spectacle of huge firecracker detonations, occurs daily at 2pm at the City Hall Square – the intense rhythm and volume increase progressively, filling the space with the smell of gunpowder and making both the ground and hearts of spectators tremble.
The event attracts large crowds, which begin to gather in the Square up to an hour before the start. Many individual fallas also fire their own mascleta afterwards between 2.30pm and 3pm in different neighbourhoods around the city.
The fallas, and accompanying ninots that make them up, are built in large warehouses (most in the Ciudad del Artista Fallero) where they remain until the moment of the Planta, when the fallero artists install them in the streets and squares and add the finishing touches. The children’s fallas are ready for public visits on March 15 and the big fallas from March 16.
From February 4 to March 15, a selected ninot from each falla is exhibited at the Ninot Exhibition, to take part in the popular vote. With one ninot from the fallas plus one children’s ninot pardoned each year, the survivors since 1934 are kept and can be visited in the Fallas Museum, which also exhibits posters and photographs of the Fallas history.
Meanwhile with all fallas considered major works of art, there is an official competition judged according to criteria such as innovation or technical and artistic quality. On March 16, different prizes are awarded in different categories (depending on the size or investment in the falla).
During the festival, music concerts and parades take place daily through the city centre.
Another popular and colourful part of the festival is the devotional Flower Offering to the Virgen de los Desamparados (Our Lady of the Forsaken) for two days on March 17 and 18, when thousands of falleros and falleras from different city neighbourhoods dress in their traditional costumes and bring flowers to a gigantic image of the patron saint of Valencia placed in the Plaza de la Virgen. The flowers gradually form a colourful mantle for the Virgin, the design of which varies each year, while the parade through the city streets (from 3.30pm) is breathtaking, due to both the extravagant traditional costumes of the participants and the music that accompanies them; the fallera mayor is the last to make her offering after midnight on March 18.
The Crema is the final act of the Fallas, when the hundreds of fallas monuments succumb to the flames in spectacular bonfires on the night of March 19, allowing visitors to see more than one falla burning.
First to burn are the children’s fallas at 10pm. At 11pm is the Crema of all the fallas in Valencia. The last falla to burn is the one located in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento in an event that attracts large crowds and brings the festival to a close.
Austria – Vienna ‘Donauinselfest’
Donauinselfest, the largest open-air music festival in Europe, takes place over a 3-day weekend (Friday-Sunday) 3 – 5 July 2026, on an island in the Danube River in the Austrian capital of Vienna – and the 3+ million annual visitors don’t need to buy a ticket because entrance is free.
When attendance across the 3 days reached 3.3 million in 2015, it was proclaimed World Record Holder of the title ‘largest attendance at a music festival’ according to the Guinness Book Of Records (verified by a specialist consultant on behalf of Guinness).
The festival began in 1984 and recent editions have featured 2,000 artists and 700 hours of programming on 11 stages – stages are added or removed in 16 tented areas around the island depending on the performance line-up – including one advertised as the largest open-air stage in Europe.
The music typically includes rock, pop, rap, hip hop, electronic music, swing, folk, metal and most genres in between (including the Vienna Symphony Orchestra). For new and unknown performers wishing to perform during Donauinselfest, an application period known as ‘Rock
The Island Contest’ begins in March. For most of the year, the 21km long and 250m wide Donauinsel Island acts as an artificial flood regulation measure in the middle of the Danube River (Europe’s second longest), and also serves as a recreational park, where visitors hike, swim, cycle, trampoline, rollerblade, canoe, climb and swim – the southern and northern parts of the island offer extensive nude beaches – as well as eat and drink in a variety of bars, restaurants and nightclubs.
But one weekend each year, a 4.5km section turns into a huge open-air music festival mixing mainly local performers with occasional international stars such as The Backstreet Boys, Anastacia, Mando Diao, Lisa Stansfield, Amy Macdonald, Michael Bolton, Sean Paul, Bob Geldof and Bonnie Tyler.
Over the 3 days, patrons have the choice of 250 food huts and stalls.
To ensure the safety of visitors, ‘house rules’ were introduced in 2007 with checkpoints established to control certain items (such as glass and liquor) inside the festival perimeter. In 2024 the festival ‘ensured the safety of all visitors’ with on-site attendance by 700 security officers, 500 police officers and 230 rescue and emergency paramedics.
UK – Edinburgh ‘Festival & Fringe’
The annual Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) and Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF) attract hundreds of thousands of tourists to a month of performances and art shows every August in Scotland’s capital city.
Major international figures from music (especially classical music) and the performing arts are invited to the EIF, supported by visual art exhibitions, talks and hosted workshops.
The first ‘International Festival of Music and Drama’ took place in 1947 with a programme covering orchestral, choral and chamber music, Lieder (setting poetry to classical music to create a piece of polyphonic music) and song, opera, ballet, drama, film and Scottish ‘piping and dancing’ on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. The aim was to ‘provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit’ and enrich the cultural life of Scotland, Britain and Europe in the wake of World War 2.
From the beginning, the festival had a broad coverage, but with an emphasis on classical music and opera an important part. Ballet was inaugurated with performances by Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann, and drama was also an important feature from inception.
The visual arts were not featured in the initial two festivals, but from 1949 they became an important part, with major early exhibitions including Rembrandt (1950), El Greco to Goya (1951), Degas (1952), Renoir (1953) Cezanne (1954) Gaugin (1955), Braque (1956), Monet (1957), Cezanne to Picasso (1958).
Many famous works received their world premieres at the Edinburgh International Festival, from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Cocktail Party’ (1949) and ‘The Confidential Clerk’ (1953) to celebrated composer Sir James MacMillan’s ‘Quickening’ and ‘Symphony No. 5’ (in 2019).
Meanwhile, concurrently the Edinburgh Festival ‘Fringe’ has grown into the world’s largest performance arts festival, featuring more than 60,000 performances of 4,000+ different shows in over 320 venues.
The ‘Fringe’ is an ‘open-access’ performing arts festival, with no selection committee – anyone may participate, with any type of performance. The official Fringe Programme categorises shows into sections for theatre, comedy, dance, physical theatre, circus, cabaret, children’s shows, musicals, opera, music, spoken word, exhibitions and events; comedy is the largest section, making up one-third of the programme. Fringe venues cover all shapes and sizes, occupying any viable space available: regular theatres, function rooms, churches and church halls, lecture theatres, conference centres, other university rooms and spaces, bars and pubs, temporary structures (the famous Spiegeltent and the Udderbelly), schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, a double-decker bus and even in the audience’s own homes.
Many notable original shows originated at the Fringe: it helped establish the careers of writers and performers including Rowan Atkinson, Steven Berkoff, Jo Brand, Billy Connolly, Ben Elton, Eddie Izzard, Stephen fry, Stewart Lee, Tim Minchin and Tadeusz Kantor.
Italy – Venice ‘Biennale’
The Venice Biennale is one of the world’s oldest and most famous international art and cultural exhibitions, hosted annually from April to November since 1895 on the island city of Venice, capital of northern Italy’s Veneto region.
Each year over 800,000 visitors attend the 7 international festivals/exhibitions which make up the Biennale. The main exhibition alternates every second year between the International Art Exhibition (Art Biennale) – founded 1895 and now on even numbered years since 2022 – and the International Architecture Exhibition (Venice Biennale of Architecture) founded 1980 and on odd numbered years since 2021.
The other annual Biennale programs include: the International Festival of Contemporary Music (Biennale Musica) founded 1930 and held every September- October; the International Theatre Festival (Biennale Teatro) founded 1934 and held every July-August; the Venice International Film Festival founded 1932 and held every August-September; the International Festival of Contemporary Dance (Venice Dance Biennale) founded 1999 and held every June; and the International Kids’ Carnival held annually during Carnevale
(a festival a month prior to Easter, famous for its elaborate costumes and masks, which ends on Shrove Tuesday, the day before the Christian start of Lent on Ash Wednesday).
The main exhibition is held in the Castello district, displayed in the halls of the Arsenale and Biennale Gardens (Giardini); other theatre, music and dance events are held in other parts of the main city, while the Venice Film Festival takes place on the Lido (an 11km adjacent island).
The Art Biennale is one of the world’s largest and most important contemporary art exhibitions; the exhibition space spans 7,000+ square metres, with artists from over 75 countries represented in both collective exhibition spaces and permanent national pavilions.
The Architecture Biennale is similarly based around one main exhibition in the Arsenale halls, plus national exhibitions hosted in the pavilions of the Arsenale and Biennale gardens. As well as the national pavilions, countless ‘unofficial pavilions’ spring up every year.
The first biennale was opened on 30 April 1895 by the Italian King Umberto and Queen Margherita di Savoia; it was seen by 224,000 visitors. The event became increasingly international in the first decades of the 20th century. From 1907 individual countries installed national pavilions at the exhibition; by 1914 seven national pavilions had been established – Belgium (1907), Hungary (1909), Germany (1909), Great Britain (1909), France (1912) and Russia (1914).
Meanwhile in 1910 the first internationally well-known artists were displayed, with a room dedicated to Gustav Klimt, a one- man show for Renoir, a retrospective of Courbet and a work by Picasso (‘Family of Saltimbanques’) controversially removed from the Spanish salon in the central Palazzo because it was feared its novelty might shock the public.
When the Art Biennale resumed after World War 2, a major exhibition in 1948 featured the Impressionists and many protagonists of contemporary art including Chagall, Klee, Braque, Delvaux, Ensor and Magritte, as well as a retrospective of Picasso’s work. In addition, Peggy Guggenheim was invited to exhibit her famous collection, later to be permanently housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal.
USA – California ‘Coachella’
The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival – always rated among the world’s best annual music festivals – is held over consecutive 3-day weekends, in 2026, 10-12 & 17-19 April at the 78-acre Empire Polo Club in Indio, a city in Riverside County in the Coachella Valley of Southern California’s Colorado Desert region.
Indio is 23 miles (37km) east of Palm Springs and 127 miles (204km) east of Los Angeles; including adjacent land used for parking and camping, the event spreads across a total footprint of 642 acres and up to 125,000 people attend each day across both weekends.
Coachella features musical artists across rock, pop, indie, hip hop, electronic dance music (EDM) and country genres – with the same line-up each weekend – and within the grounds, several stages continuously host live music.
Notable past performers include Beyonce, Madonna, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Prince, Paul McCartney, Pharrell Williams, The Cure, Radiohead, Oasis, Bjork, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Iggy Pop, Coldplay, Daft Punk, Leonard Cohen, Kings Of Leon, Kanye West, Blur, AC/DC, Drake, Eminem, Ariana Grande, Rage Against The Machine, Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar. The festival also helped launch careers of The Killers, Arctic Monkeys and Adele.
Coachella has also featured major reunions from Destiny’s Child, LCD Soundsystem, N.W.A., OutKast, At the Drive In, Pulp, Death From Above 1979, The Stone Roses and Guns ‘N Roses.
And Coachella is also famous for providing annual ‘surprises’, from Justin Bieber making his comeback appearance during Ariana Grande’s performance, to 2Pac’s hologram resurrection during Dr Dre’s set.
In addition to live music, Coachella also boasts a ‘cutting edge’ showcase for visual arts, including installation art – many of the pieces are interactive – and sculpture.
In recent years Coachella has also become a huge platform for the latest fashion trends – models, celebrities and social media content creators fly in from all over the world to showcase their newest ‘look’ and trend predictions. H&M was the first high-street fashion brand to open its own boutique on Coachella grounds, featuring its latest festival collection.
Germany – Berlin ‘Film Festival’
The Berlin International Film Festival (the ‘Berlinale’) is one of the world’s major international film festivals, to be held 12 – 22 February 2026, in Germany’s capital and largest city.
Founded in 1951 at the beginning of the Cold War as a ‘showcase of the free world’ – shaped by the turbulent post-war period and the unique situation of a divided city – the Berlinale ‘has developed into a place of intercultural exchange and a platform for the critical cinematic exploration of social issues’. To this day it is considered the most political of all the major film festivals.
Today the Berlinale is one of Europe’s ‘Big Three’ annual film festivals – alongside the Venice Film Festival (part of the Venice Biennale: see separate breakout box in this story) and Cannes Film Festival (not open to the public, with access reserved for film industry professionals who need an official accreditation). The Berlinale is the largest based on attendance, with around 325,000 tickets sold and nearly 16,000 film industry professionals from 130 countries attending.
The festival screens 400+ films at multiple venues across the city – mostly in and around Potsdamer Platz – in 9 sections across cinematic genres, with around 20 films competing for the festival’s top awards in the Competition section, the Golden Bear and Silver Bears (decided by an international jury, chaired by an internationally recognisable cinema personality).
The Berlinale Talents, held in partnership with the festival, is a gathering of young filmmakers in a week-long series of lectures and workshops. Also simultaneous with the Berlinale is the European Film Market, a major film trade fair for distributors, film buyers, producers, financiers and co-production agents.
Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rebecca’ opened the first festival at the art deco Titania-Palast Theatre in Steglitz on 6 June 1951. For the 60th edition in 2010, the city of Berlin unveiled its ‘Boulevard of the Stars’, with the first 40 stars devoted to actors and filmmakers of the German-speaking film and TV industry; first to be honoured was German-American actress Marlene Dietrich.
The films of all genres, lengths and formats shown in the 8 competition sections plus special presentations of the Berlinale – across the spectrum from feature films to documentary forms and artistic experiments – are chosen specifically to invite the audiences ‘to encounter highly contrasting milieus, ways of life and attitudes, to put their own judgements and prejudices to the test and to reinvigorate their experience of seeing and perceiving in the realm between classic narrative forms and extraordinary aesthetics’.
The programme also ‘thrives on an intense dialogue with its audiences: a rich array of spoken-word events, audience discussions and expert panels facilitate an active participation in the festival’.
Brazil – Rio ‘Carnivale’
Brazil is the largest country in South America and its annual Carnivale in Rio de Janeiro – its second biggest city with a population 14 million – in the month leading up to the beginning of Lent (13 – 21 February, 2026) has consistently been described by international travel experts as the greatest show on earth.
Carnivale’s cacophonous mixture of spectacularly coloured parades, combined with 24-hour parties and 40 days of exuberant open-air performances, transform the city into a month long ‘community stage’ – often featuring more than two million people each day participating in the revelry; in one famous ‘bloco’ (local neighbourhood) street party in 2012, police reported more than 5 million people attended without a single criminal incident.
In the week before Ash Wednesday, the famous samba school parades are an amalgamation of dance, fashion, music, narrative, spectacle and competition, featuring hundreds of outrageously decorated floats, equally flamboyant costumes and thousands of gyrating dancers from the city’s 200+ samba schools specialising in dancing, marching and drumming (‘Samba Enredo’ clubs) which represent individual city neighbourhoods (blocos).
The samba competitors climax their performances with early morning entrance into the Sambadrome (Sambodromo), a long, narrow arena with a runway for the parades with bleacher seating for 73,000 spectators.
The particular samba displayed in Rio is Battucanada (referring to the dance and music based on percussion instruments) which ‘is born of a rhythmic necessity that it allows you to sing, dance and parade at the same time’.
Rio’s Carnivale dates back to 1723, initially mimicking celebrations brought to Brazil by Portuguese colonisers and known as the ‘Entrudo’ – a popular festival where public games and light- hearted mockery would run wild in the streets; over time, the festival added ostentatious use of masks and costumes.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Samba and Batucada rhythms classically associated with Rio’s carnivale were introduced by Afro-Brazilians, adapting different cultural inputs to produce a new musical genre; during this period, Carnivale assumed its position as the biggest popular festival in Brazil.
Carnivale dates move every year, beginning on the Friday 40 days before Easter (hence preceding the start of Lent) and ending on Ash Wednesday.
Different types of Sambadrome tickets are available for purchase: Grandstand tickets are general admissions tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis and not allocated ahead of time; Frisas are open-air box seats located along the samba runway; Camarotes are luxury boxes situated between the frisas and the grandstands; Sector 9 is a special tourist sector with grandstand tickets allocated for assigned seats.
Simultaneously with the samba parades, multi-street festivals featuring ‘Bandas’ – Mexican street bands traditionally including brass and woodwind instruments, drums and singers – continue along most major streets and the beachside promenades at Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, with visitors and tourists encouraged to join in. There are often more than 300 bandas performing at any given time.
USA – Wisconsin ‘Summerfest’
The Summerfest annual music festival features 600+ artists performing from noon to midnight across 12 stages over 3 consecutive long weekends (9 days) 18 – 20, 25 – 27 June and 2 – 4 July 2026 at the 75-acre Henry Maier Festival Park on the Lake Michigan shore in downtown Milwaukee, the largest city in the state of Wisconsin.
First held in 1968, Summerfest is operated by Milwaukee World Festival, a non-profit organisation governed by a volunteer board of directors. Summerfest bills itself as ‘the people’s party’, with a 2024 single-day General Admission ticket only US$28.
The huge annual attendances vary between 500,000-850,000 depending on each year’s headline act ensemble and the weather; the record is 1,000,563 attendees in 2001.
Music choice covers all genres: alternative, Americana, bluegrass, blues, contemporary, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hard rock, metal, hip hop, indie, jam band, jazz, pop, R&B, reggae, rock and zydeco.
In its 57 years history, Summerfest has hosted many of the world’s most famous music icons: Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Jackson 5, Frank Sinatra, Prince, Fleetwood Mac, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston,
Rod Stewart, Britney Spears, The Doors, INXS, Sting, Metallica, Bon Jovi, Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith, Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, James Taylor, Arctic Monkeys, Usher, Dave Matthews Band, Kenny Chesney, Janet Jackson, Jonas Brothers, Christina Aguilera, Roy Orbison, Liza Minelli, Kayne West, Pink,
Nine Inch Nails, The Ramones, Billie Eilish, Willie Nelson, Motley Crew, Keith Urban, Ed Sheeran, Dolly Parton, Sly and the Family Stone, Steve Miller Band, Johnny Cash, Beach Boys, Kenny Loggins, Santana, Eric Clapton, Huey Lewis and the News, Bryan Adams, Paul Simon, Cher, Pearl Jam, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Destiny’s Child, John Mellencamp, Steely Dan, Kings Of Leon, Neil Young and Kendrick Lamar.
Live comedy acts are also part of Summerfest’s history: Bob Hope was comedy headliner at Summerfest 1969; and George Carlin (opening for Arlo Guthrie) infamously performed his ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television’ routine in 1972 before being arrested for violating obscenity laws (prior to his arrest, he discarded a bag of cocaine to avoid further imprisonment).
A regular Comedy Showcase was established from 1975 and has included Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, David Brenner, Henny Youngman, Sandra Bernhard and Lewis Black.
While camping is not allowed on the Summerfest grounds or in the surrounding area, many hotels in downtown Milwaukee offer attractive Summerfest packages. Summerfest also showcases a wide variety of food from many Milwaukee-area restaurants.
Morocco – Rabat ‘Mawazine’
Mawazine – meaning ‘rhythms of the world’ – is a Moroccan international music festival held annually over a week in May in the capital city Rabat, on Africa’s northwest Atlantic Ocean coast, and attended by up to 3 million patrons.
Begun in 2001 as a celebration of Moroccan culture and arts, it was expanded from 2008 by the personal secretary to King Mohammad IV into a massive tribute to African music – with up to 100 acts performing on 7 stages – and now attracts its large crowds of visitors from both internal cities such as Casablanca (largest city in Morocco), Marrakech and Tangier, as well as many international tourists.
Among major international musicians to have performed at Mawazine are Whitney Houston, Elton John, Mariah Carey, Kylie Minogue, Sting, Julio Iglesias, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Rod Stewart, Charles Aznavour, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, Shakira, Rihanna,
Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Lopez, Demi Lovato, Ricky Martin, Pharrell Williams, Iggy Azalea, Bruno Mars, Kanye West, The Jacksons, Lenny Kravitz, Cat Stevens, B.B. King, Carlos Santana and Deep Purple.
A unique feature of Mawazine is its ‘commitment to accessibility, with nearly 90% of the shows open to all’.
The organisers ‘underline the festival’s mission to democratise access to culture, emphasising the role of Mawazine in bringing people together through music’.
Also of interest to international tourists, the city of Rabat itself (resting along the shores of the Bou Regreg River) is renowned for a series of landmarks highlighting its Islamic and French-colonial heritage – including the Kasbah of the Udayas (a Berber-era royal fort surrounded by formal French-designed gardens overlooking the Atlantic Ocean) and the iconic Hassan Tower (a 12th- century minaret soaring above the ruins of an ancient mosque).
