Barcelona's Primavera Sound Festival Is Heading to Los Angeles

The Barcelona-based festival Primavera Sound will make its debut in Los Angeles in 2020, the L.A. Times reports.

Widely considered one of Europe’s most reputable festivals, the American edition of Primavera will take place at Los Angeles State Historic Park in Chinatown on September 19-20, 2020. Early tickets go on sale Friday.

“We had been thinking about crossing the Atlantic for some time now and, in particular, about Los Angeles,” Gabi Ruiz, director and founder of Primavera Sound told the Times. “Los Angeles is a city that has always fascinated [us]. Its vitality, its appeal, its forward thinking. We feel that in some ways, in Barcelona, we share the sensations and way of experiencing things with Los Angeles.”

L.A. won’t be the first international version of the festival, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary next year. Primavera has a smaller annual satellite in Porto, Portugal, which launched in 2012. According to Ruiz, the L.A. rendition will be more similar to Porto than the flagship, which attracts 220,000 fans from 150 countries. Sitting at 32 acres, the L.A. State Historic Park can fit as many as 25,000 people.

The L.A. edition can’t exactly clone Barcelona’s more relaxed nightlife and music culture, but Ruiz shared that the Chinatown location is a fair likeness to Primavera’s setting. Ruiz said that “respecting the idiosyncrasy of the city” is fundamental to the festival, and while much of the draw to Primavera is its hometown, the organisers said they’ll evoke Barcelona as best as possible in L.A.

“Obviously our main interest is to be able to transport the vibe of Barcelona and of our festival to California, but we will always find it wherever we go,” Ruiz said.