Qualla: Lowlands Festival

Lowlands Festival: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sandra Fauconnier, CC BY 4.0. In 2003, a boy named Theo Vlaar stepped out of the Lowlands entrance queue to go to the bathroom and could not find his friends when he came back. They started shouting his name. Other people heard them and joined in. Within hours, strangers were yelling "Theo!" across the campsite, and the call spread back the following year, and the year after, and the year after that. Two decades on, you still hear it drifting across the polder at 3am - "THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEO!" - shouted into the dark by tens of thousands of people who have no idea who Theo Vlaar is. Welcome to Lowlands.

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Image: Sandra Fauconnier | CC BY 4.0

Lowlands Festival: Built on Reclaimed Land

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SGeerlings, CC BY-SA 4.0. The festival happens every August at Spijk en Bremerberg, just outside Biddinghuizen, about 68 km east of Amsterdam. The land underneath the tents did not exist a century ago. This is Flevoland, the youngest Dutch province, drained from the Zuiderzee in the mid-20th century, and ...

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Image: SGeerlings | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lowlands Festival: The Failed First Try

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Coldbolt, CC0. The story doesn't actually start in 1993. The first Flight to Lowlands Paradise was organised in November 1967 by an Utrecht-based artist and painter named Bunk Bessels. Entry was 10 guilders, breakfast included, and the 18-hour event in the Margriethal of the Utrecht Jaarbeurs o...

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Image: Coldbolt | CC0

Lowlands Festival: Revival, Mud, and Rage

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Timster, CC BY-SA 3.0. In August 1993 Willem Venema dragged the concept back from the dead. Conditions were poor - 15 degrees and rain on Friday - and only 7,000 people turned up, well short of the 10,000 organiser Mojo Concerts had been hoping for. Tickets cost 75 guilders, sold at the entrance, and a...

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Image: Timster | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lowlands Festival: The Bridge of Death

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1998 the festival outgrew its land and built an improvised bridge across the trunk road to put the campsite on the other side. Festivalgoers quickly named it the bridge of death because crossing it with a backpack, a tent, a cooler and a crate of beer at six in the morning was...

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Image: Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lowlands Festival: More Than Just Music

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Coldbolt, CC BY-SA 4.0. Lowlands has always insisted it is not only a music festival. By the mid-1990s it had added a theatre tent (Delta) and a comedy tent (Echo). The Dommelsch tent became a late-night outdoor cinema. Literature readings, stand-up sets, cabaret, ballet, even comic strip exhibitions wo...

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Image: Coldbolt | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lowlands Festival: Aging Gracefully, Sort Of

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dan Kamminga from Haarlem, Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. The festival's twenties brought turbulence. New competitors - Best Kept Secret in 2013, Mojo's own Down the Rabbit Hole - chipped away at the indie monopoly Lowlands had enjoyed. In 2014 the festival took noticeably longer to sell out; van Eerdenburg admitted that part of the ori...

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Image: Dan Kamminga from Haarlem, Netherlands | CC BY 2.0