The Vilar de Mouros festival in Caminha begins on Wednesday with another day of music, four in total, hoping to add another 10,000 people to the 60,000 who attended the event in 2022, the organization said today.
Speaking to the Lusa news agency, Diogo Marques, from the Vilar de Mouros festival organizers, explained that “the 2023 edition has big names, different on different days, for different audiences”.
“You can see it in the ticket sales. We’re selling more tickets than in previous years and we hope to sell many more before the festival,” said Diogo Marques.
He added that “the audience is segmented by day, according to their favorite band”.
“We expect it to be a bigger event than in previous years and we’re preparing everything to welcome people in optimal conditions,” he said.
The Vilar de Mouros festival, in the parish of Caminha in the district of Viana do Castelo, starts on Wednesday and ends on Saturday, with names such as Limp Bizkit and The Prodigy, among others.
James, Pendulum, Within Temptation, Xutos & Pontapés, Ornatos Violeta, The Bloody Beetroots DJ ‘set’, Millencolin, Peaches, Guano Apes, Enter Shikari, Apocalyptica, Bizarra Locomotiva, The Last Internationale, Nowhere To Be Found and Micomaníacos are other confirmed bands.
Organized by Surprise & Expectation, this year the festival will have Crédito Agrícola as its naming sponsor and Caminha Town Council and Vilar de Mouros Parish Council as partners.
The organization’s expectations point to an increase of “at least 10,000 more people at the festival than in 2022, when it welcomed 60,000 festival-goers over three days”.
The Vilar de Mouros venue, “a music sanctuary by the river Coura”, is the same size as the previous edition, with “reinforced catering facilities, toilets and bars”.
Diogo Marques revealed that one of this year’s novelties is the “involvement of sponsors in entertainment activities for festival-goers, such as the historic stage, which has hosted names such as U2 or Elton John, among many others, which will guarantee entertainment before and after the concerts”.
There will also be initiatives on the river, canoeing workshops, dances on the river beach and a supermarket on the campsite.
The campsite, with capacity for 4,000 tents and a glamping area with more than 100 tents, opened on Sunday and is already welcoming “several hundred people”, a number that the organization believes will increase as the start of the festival approaches on Wednesday.
“We’ve prepared this area very carefully so that people have all the facilities they have at home. Hot showers, hygiene and food preparation areas,” he said.
“We wanted to create the conditions for people to come not just for a good day out [at the festival], but for a vacation in Vilar de Mouros, with various activities throughout the day and night,” he said.
The country’s first music festival, which to this day enjoys the reputation of a Portuguese “Woodstock”, took place in 1971 in Vilar de Mouros, having suffered an eight-year hiatus between 2006 and 2014.
The first edition, in 1971, launched by doctor António Barge, was attended, among others, by Elton John and Manfred Mann.
The pass for the four days of the festival costs 120 euros and for the 24th, 25th and 26th 90 euros. The daily ticket costs 45 euros.
