Azkena Rock Festival

The Azkena Rock Festival (a.k.a. ARF) is one of the most relevant Spanish rock festivals. It is celebrated in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Álava) organized by Last Tour International. ARF is notorious due to its diverse cartel of groups and for the submerse 'chill' environment of the festival. It is aimed to underground public, escaping commercial mainstream agenda.

In 2006, the festival sold over 44,000 tickets, the most in its history, due to the presence of Pearl Jam. Some other bands included Iggy & The Stooges, Wilco, Alice Cooper, Social Distortion, Tool, Queens of the Stone Age, Ray Davies, Bad Religion, Sex Pistols, Deep Purple, The Black Crowes, Hanoi Rocks, Fun Lovin Criminals, Kiss, Slash, Imelda May or Bad Brains. In 2011 the festival celebrated the 10th year anniversary with the "rocker" topic: Las Vegas.

EDITIONS

2002 edition

The inaugural festival was celebrated in the Azkena Gasteiz and was organized by Muskerra (an organization of the Basque Country).The duration was of three days:12–14 September 2002.

2001 EDITION

The second edition of the festival was the big jump it needed to become as good as it was planned to be. Three new things made the festival a great rock place where people could enjoy very different things always with this rock music. The first one was that took plaze in Mendizorroza, Vitoria-Gasteiz. The best point of that year was that there were two different stages and all the concerts took place one after other with little gap between performances. The Stooges were chosen as the headline act that year. In total 12,000 fans attended to the little city of Vitoria so they could enjoy the Azkena Rock Festival. This made money and they used that for the next editions.

...
Wikipedia