Paleo Festival

Paléo Festival
Paléo Festival de Nyon - 2009.
Genre	Rock music,
Dates	end of July, from Tuesday to Sunday
Location(s)	Nyon, Switzerland
Years active	1976-present
Attendance	230,000+

The Paléo Festival de Nyon, usually just called Paléo, is an annual rock festival held in Nyon, Switzerland, between Geneva and Lausanne. It started in a small way in 1976 as the Nyon Folk Festival. It was originally held near Lake Geneva and had only two stages, but today it is one of the major open-air music festivals in mainland Europe and the biggest in Switzerland. Today the event has grown to include international artists. It has also moved to the plaine de L'Asse, accessible either by walking, bus or the Chemin de fer Nyon-St-Cergue-Morez narrow-gauge railway.

The festival lasts six days at the end of July, from Tuesday to Sunday, and the final main stage concert is preceded by a great firework display with music.

As of 2005, 3.5 million spectators and 2500 artists had been part of the Paléo Festival.

The Paléo features six stages:

Since 2003, the Paléo has introduced Le Village du Monde (The World Village) section, which is a space reserved for an invited region of the world. This place offers the region's culture and food. It also includes Le Dôme which shows only artists from the invited region.

280,000 visitors and over 5,000 staff participated in the 2015 event.

Tickets can be purchased on the Paléo Website. Special offers are available usually as early as November of the year preceding the next Paléo festival with discounted all-week passes. Later in Spring the official programme is published and the second, slightly less discounted tickets are available. They are often sold out very quickly. In the months preceding the festival more tickets are sold at full price.

To fight black-market ticket sales, 1500 one-day tickets are held up to be sold the same day as their validity date and can be purchased online (to be printed by the buyer).

The lineup used to be revealed on a late April Wednesday at noon, following which, both tickets and passes would sell out within days. From 2008 onwards, the lineup is unveiled one week prior to the sale, giving people plenty of time to make up their mind and thus rushing them online to get their tickets one week later. In 2009, all 280,000 tickets and passes were sold in a record one-and-a-half hours.

There are a lot of ways to access the festival, whether by special trains and buses, by car, by bike, or walking.

Invited artists:

For a full list see the 1997 history.

Invited artists:

For a full list see the 1998 history.