a story about Spanish festivals
Does it possible to party all year long from festival to festival throughout Spain?
The story starts from the New Year holiday at the 1st of January
For the better clusterisation we will use administrative division of Spain in autonomous communities (comunidades) and provinces.
Each province of Spain has its major festival that usually has the largest popularity, the most abundant budgeting and the largest attracted audience.
Festivals of Spain are officially classified by Ministry of Tourism in 3 categories: ” de interes international”, “de interes national”, “de interes regional”. Festivals de interes international are predominantly concentrated in regions of Galicia, Castilla-La Leon, Andalucia and Valenciana, they include the lion’s part of religious events like Semana Santa, Corpus Christi.
Festivals “de interes national” represent officially differentiated festivals of the lower level of state attention then international, and are scattered within the same regions as festivals “de interes international” with the significant addition of regions of Asturias, Cantabria, Aragon, Castilla-Leon, Extremadura, Canarias, La Rioja.
Summarizing the top two official categories we get circa 230 festivals covering the whole Spain area except Catalonia, Baleares and Basque Country that festivals left in the remaining 670 at regional and local levels. Indeed, the official classification does not always reflects the touristic significance of festivals.
Then we can compare major province festivals with festivals “de interes international”, where we reveal that top-budgeted festivals are not directly correlated with official classification.
Analyzing attendance of festivals is quite complex procedure. Nevertheless patterns unveil fixation of the largest amount of festival visitors across the Mediterranean cities and Basque Country.
The most abundance follows festival cities of regions of Andalucia, Valenciana, Catalonia and Basque Country.
Ratio of tourists arrived to a festival and local citizens unveil the smallest towns with historical heritage.
The correlation of money spent per festival and amount of town population highlights the smallest towns in historical areas next to province centers.
What about modern music festivals?
Primavera sound. Mad Cool Festival. Sonar. Bilbao BBK Live. BIF: Festival International de Benicassim. A summer story festival. Azkena Rock Festival. BBF: Barcelona Beach Festival. Rototom Sunsplash European Reggae Festival
Of 100 modern music festivals 25 of them attract more than 50 000 visitors per annum. By budgeting the leadership is after La Primavera in Barcelona. One more barcelonian Sonar, BBK in Bilbao, and two other festivals in summer tourist towns round up the top-5 budgeted festivals of modern music in Spain.
Here we getting an insight: while budgets of commercial festivals are significantly higher then traditional, amount of visitors goes far below traditional corresponding to the top-20 places from them. The top traditional festival Las Fallas attracting more 3 mln people to Valencia in opposite to the top modern music festival La Primavera attracting to Barcelona just 0.5 mln people. Despite that their budgets are quite opposite, 8.5 mln euro for Las Fallas and 50 mln euro for La Primavera.
Let’s put all festivals on a time-graded map and figure out the spatial and time concentration.
Most burlesque festivals corresponding to 24 two-week periods of the year
Let’s go through each two-week period of festivals one by one.
Main insights of the festival industry of Spain.
Analyzing 300 festivals from the total 900 in Spain we have got the party calendar almost without gaps
And now, choose your itinerary and let’s go to party!
REFERENCES:
- Gobierto. Repuestos municipales https://presupuestos.gobierto.es;
- Dados abiertos del Gobierno de Espana https://datos.gob.es;
- Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo https://turismo.gob.es;
- Wikipedia;
- Blog ‘El espanol y Espana desde centro’ https://www.youtube.com/@SmelSerendipia
- Different sources about festivals and budgeting culture;
- Larazon. La fiesta más popular de cada provincia de España. https://www.larazon.es/espana/20211224/rgveqijauvcg7hkoyuzskngebe.html
