This year’s Sziget Festival will see the most attendees from the Netherlands, followed by the British and the Irish. The ratio between foreign and domestic visitors is approximately fifty-fifty, the event’s main organiser stated on Wednesday.

Tamás Kádár, speaking during the press tour of the Sziget Festival that will run from Thursday, 9 August to Wednesday, 15 August, revealed that based on pre-sale ticket and pass purchases, Friday will be the strongest day (with Imagine Dragons as the main act), but even the closing day on Tuesday with Billie Eilish could potentially be sold out, as well as Saturday with David Guetta. ‘Among the foreign countries where visitors are from New Zealand and Australia, situated 18,000 kilometres away, have shown remarkable growth,’ highlighted Tamás Kádár.

This year’s Sziget will feature more than fifty programme venues, with artists from 62 countries performing in various genres and nearly two hundred Hungarian performers. Tamás Kádár emphasised that after the ‘turbulence’ of the past three years, including the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent restart last year, the company is back on a trajectory of growth this year. ‘The festival is returning to its former glory, with numerous convenience innovations and aesthetic improvements making Sziget even more appealing.’

Spread across 76 hectares, this year’s festival was set up in three weeks. The maximum daily capacity is 90,000 people, including both festival staff and attendees, making Sziget the country’s tenth largest city for the six days of its duration. The main stage was constructed in ten days, with a floor area of over a thousand square metres and a six hundred square metre LED wall serving as its backdrop.

Several global stars will perform at Sziget. Billie Eilish will give her first concert in Hungary, joined by artists like Florence + The Machine, Imagine Dragons, David Guetta, Mumford & Sons, Lorde, and Macklemore. Not headlining but still global stars, the main stage will host acts like Sam Fender, Foals, Yungblud, Arlo Parks, and Caroline Polachek. The highlighted stage will feature Hungarian performers in the afternoons, including special shows by Halott Pénz, Carson Coma, and Dzsúdló. Dániel Benis, the technical director of Sziget, revealed that the main stage’s two LED walls are 13 by 13 metres large, with a 4K resolution.

 ‘Among the most significant developments is the removal of portable restrooms from communal areas, replaced by water-flushing toilets, with about a thousand WCs in decorative container blocks. We’ve also introduced free drinking water services in multiple locations,’ the main organiser noted.

Due to the high water levels of the Danube, swimming in the river will not be allowed at the Beach area this year.

As mentioned in our earlier article on this year’s Sziget, a new feature is the Citizen Centre in the city centre, providing customer service, information, and complaint handling. Several camping sites with different levels of services are available for festivalgoers on the Sziget premises. Equipped with over two hundred personnel, including doctors, nurses, assistants, as well as ambulances and their crews, the health care centre will be accessible 24/7. In addition to treating minor injuries, doctors can even perform X-ray examinations at the ‘hospital.’

A security company and law enforcement personnel will make sure that festivalgoers are safe, and a fire brigade will also be present. The control centre responsible for coordinating the various services on the island will include meteorologists, firefighters, representatives of the armed forces, as well as operators.

During the festival, around 25,000 square metres of plastic and an additional 5,000 square metres of aluminium roads will be laid down. To eliminate the issue of airborne dust, which was a significant concern last year, a new environmentally friendly dust-binding material will be used alongside continuous ‘greywater’ irrigation. The use of internal combustion engine vehicles on the premises will be minimised. In the spirit of environmental protection, the area near the forest adjacent to District III will again be closed due to its protected flora, aligning with the reclassification of the area into a nature conservation site carried out by the city and WWF.

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