FAR

By the time FAR València rolls back into the city, summer will already be drunk on its own heat. The sun will hang low over the marina like a guilty conscience, the air thick with salt, sweat and bad decisions, and somewhere between the yachts and the concrete, music will start to pulse like a second heartbeat.

From July 8 to July 31, Marina Norte becomes ground zero for one of the boldest cultural experiments Valencia has dared to stage in recent years: not a weekend binge, not a disposable festival blur, but a long-form musical siegedesigned to stretch across nearly a month of Mediterranean nights. This is FAR València — not a festival in the traditional sense, but a slow-burn cycle of concerts that treats summer like it deserves to be treated: patiently, obsessively, and at full volume.

The lineup reads like the fevered notes of a DJ who stopped sleeping sometime in 1997 and never looked back. Jean-Michel Jarre, electronic music’s original mad scientist, will turn the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències into a glowing sci-fi cathedral, where lasers, architecture and sound collide in a show that feels less like a concert and more like controlled ignition. Elsewhere in the cycle, Belle & Sebastian arrive to perform Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister in full — a fragile, defiant act of nostalgia that somehow still feels dangerous in 2026.

Babasonicos, fresh off the biggest European tour of their career, bring their sleek, subversive Latin rock swagger to the coast, while ZZ Top roll in like survivors from a hotter, dirtier era of rock history, beards intact, riffs loaded. Then there’s the wild card energy: Rick Astley, now fully reborn as a cult icon rather than a punchline; OMD, synth-pop pioneers reminding everyone where the future first came from; MEUTE, the German techno marching band who turn brass instruments into weapons of mass dancefloor destruction. Add Luz Casal, Xoel López, Silvana Estrada, Elvis Crespo, M-Clan, and a new wave of artists cutting across genres and generations, and you start to understand what FAR is really doing here: flattening musical borders and letting everything coexist under the same humid night sky.

Marina Norte isn’t just a venue — it’s a psychological state. The sea is always close enough to smell. The city skyline glows behind you like a witness. There’s no mud, no camping hellscape, no 12-hour survival test. You arrive, you drink something cold, you lose yourself in sound, and then you drift back into the city like nothing happened — except everything did. FAR’s first edition proved there was an appetite for this kind of experience, drawing tens of thousands of people across multiple nights and confirming that Valencia doesn’t just consume culture — it inhales it deeply and asks for more

What makes FAR València dangerous — in the best possible way — is its refusal to rush. This isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon of emotion, memory and volume. You don’t just “attend” FAR. You orbit it. One night becomes two. Two become five. Suddenly it’s late July and your internal clock is synced to guitar intros and synth pulses.

FAR València isn’t trying to be the loudest festival in Spain. It’s trying to be the one that lingers longest in your bloodstream. And when the final note fades somewhere near the end of July, Valencia will still be warm, still buzzing, still half-convinced that maybe this city really does run on music after dark.

for tickets and more information: FAR