Vida Festival

From Faraday to the Masia d'en Cabanyes

Vida began in 2014 in Vilanova i la Geltrú, the coastal capital of the Garraf county some 50km down the shore from Barcelona, as the successor to Faraday, the mid-format indie gathering that had first turned the town into a stage for international bookings. Dani Poveda, a musician before he was a promoter, ran Faraday and has directed Vida from its first edition onwards.

The site is the Masia d'en Cabanyes, a farmhouse estate on the edge of town with woodland running off it, and the original pitch was built around that geography: the beach by day, the rural estate by night. The opening edition put Lana Del Rey at the top of the bill, with Rufus Wainwright, Yo La Tengo, M. Ward and the pairing of Sílvia Pérez Cruz with Raül Fernández Miró beneath her, which set the pattern the festival has kept since — one or two names with international pull, a layer of Spanish-language songwriting, and a Catalan undercard given real stage time rather than afternoon filler.

The estate also explains why the festival reads smaller than its attendance figure. Performances are spread across the main Estrella Damm stage, the La Masia stage, La Cabana, the woodland platform El Vaixell, La Cova and the Vida Club electronic space, so the crowd is split between clearings rather than massed in front of one scaffold.

Twelve editions, and a capacity that has not moved

The run through the 2010s was built on established alternative-rock bookings: Primal Scream and The War on Drugs in 2015, Wilco in 2016, Phoenix, The Flaming Lips, Fleet Foxes and Devendra Banhart in 2017, Franz Ferdinand alongside Los Planetas and Calexico in 2018, and Hot Chip, Beirut and José González in 2019. No edition took place in 2020; the seventh, in 2021, was led by Vetusta Morla, Belle and Sebastian and alt-J.

Across that period Vida took the second prize for medium-format festival, and the thing the organisers point to most often is the ceiling rather than the bill. Poveda has put the maximum at 10,000 people per day, describing it as unchanged and as a deliberate trade of volume for the experience of the people on site — a defensible position in Catalonia, where the summer calendar is dense enough that scale is the easiest thing to buy and the hardest thing to stand out with.

The other long-running feature is El Niu, a programmed area for children and families with workshops and small concerts, which is why the crowd at the Masia skews wider than a typical indie bill: teenagers from the town, families, and older local residents alongside the travelling festival audience. The site's other reliable claim is early booking — Rosalía and Rigoberta Bandini both played Vida well before they could fill a main stage anywhere.

2025, and the bill that followed it

The eleventh edition ran from 3 to 5 July 2025 and reported 32,000 spectators across the three days, matching 2024. Supergrass headlined, marking three decades of their debut album, with Future Islands, Ichiko Aoba and Benjamin Clementine among the international bookings and Rufus T. Firefly, Javiera Mena and Rusowsky on the Spanish side. A reviewer on site noted something no programmer controls: it was the first year warm enough that nobody needed a jacket in the small hours.

The twelfth edition was announced on 25 November 2025, built around the motto Imagine and a white-dominated visual identity, with first-wave passes and day tickets going on sale at an opening price. Fatboy Slim and Guitarricadelafuente were the two anchors, joined by Amaia on a first visit to the festival, Saint Etienne, Aldous Harding, Charlotte Cardin, Nu Genea, Osees, Ralphie Choo, Maria Arnal, Yerai Cortés and Lewis OfMan, across a bill of more than 60 artists over three days.

The Catalan half of that list was unusually heavy even by Vida's standards: La Ludwig Band, Sidonie, Ferran Palau, El Petit de Cal Eril, Maig, Triquell, Maria Jaume, Dan Peralbo i El Comboi, Les Fades, Remei de Ca La Fresca and Roserona, with Shame, Depresión Sonora, Juan Wauters, Frente Cumbiero, Cupido, Balu Brigada, Ángeles Toledano and Tyler Ballgame filling out the rest.

What actually happened in July 2026

The festival opened at 5.30pm on Thursday 2 July and closed in the early hours of Sunday 5 July, again reporting 32,000 across the three days — flat since 2024, which the organisers frame as the point rather than a plateau. The opening was handed to El Petit de Cal Eril, who built a one-off piece called El Petit de Cal Eril i la Processó Metafísica out of local folklore, performed as something closer to a procession than a set.

Thursday exposed the limit of the formula. The two theoretical international headliners of the day, Charlotte Cardin and Saint Etienne, drew modest crowds, and reviewers described a gap between the audience in the field and the acts booked to top it. The Spanish-language and Catalan bookings reversed that completely: Guitarricadelafuente, on the main stage at 11.30pm on Friday, and Amaia, at 10pm on Saturday, pulled the largest and the most word-perfect crowds of the weekend.

Amaia's set became the edition's talking point for two reasons. One was the performance itself, including a passage on transverse flute that reviewers compared to her Tiny Desk appearance. The other was her running commentary from the microphone: she asked repeatedly for frontal lighting so her face could be seen, pointing out that she had spent a long time on her make-up and would like it lit, and suggested the festival sort it for future years. A separate problem backed her up — electronic music carrying over from the Vida Club stage bled into her set, leaving her turning round on stage to work out where it was coming from.

The smaller stages took the weight of the good notices. Yerai Cortés played El Vaixell late on Saturday with nothing but a microphone and a guitar, the sound running out into the trees, and La Cabana drew similar praise for close-quarters sets from Osees, Frente Cumbiero and Ángeles Toledano. Fatboy Slim closed the festival from 2.15am to 4.15am. Complaints that did land were logistical rather than musical: the toilets needed work, and an overlap with the Tour de France pulled some of the audience away early on the Saturday to find a screen.

Where it stands going into 2027

The thirteenth edition is dated for 1 to 3 July 2027 at the same site, and the bill has started in the way Vida bills usually do — not with a stadium name but with Chinese American Bear, the Seattle mandopop duo of Anne Tong and Bryce Barsten, announced as the first act while the rest of the line-up is filled in through the autumn and winter. Passes have been on sale since shortly after the 2026 edition closed, at an opening tier that rises as the bill is confirmed.

The questions hanging over the festival are the ones its own 2026 reviews raised. Flat attendance is a policy outcome, not a problem, but the weak draw of the imported headliners against the pull of Amaia and Guitarricadelafuente suggests the international tier is now the least load-bearing part of the bill. The fixes requested on site — stage lighting on the main stage, enough separation between the electronic space and the headline slot that the two do not overlap, better toilets — are cheap next to a booking budget, and whether they appear in July 2027 is the clearest test of how much of the festival's self-description as an experience-first operation survives contact with a third consecutive 32,000-person weekend.