Roskilde Festival

Roskilde Festival is a festival held south of Roskilde in Denmark and is one of the six biggest annual music festivals in Europe (the other five being the Sziget Festival, the Glastonbury Festival, the Paléo Festival, Rock Werchter, and Exit Festival). It was created in 1971 by two high school students, Mogens Sandfær and Jesper Switzer Møller, and promoter Carl Fischer. In 1972, the festival was taken over by the Roskilde Foundation, which has since run the festival as a non-profit organization for development and support of music, culture and humanism.

It is Denmark's first real music-oriented festival, originally for hippies but today it covers more of the mainstream youth from Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. Roskilde Festival 2007 had more than 180 performing bands and gathered around 80,000 people paying for the concerts, with more than 21,000 volunteers, 5,000 media people and 3,000 artists – which means almost 110,000 people participated in the festival.

For many years it was a tradition that the campsite opened the last Sunday of June, but in 2010 the festival opened Saturday instead. The festival management argued that this would prevent earlier years problems with the fence going down before time. The early opening of the campsite gives the festival guests plenty of time to settle down and "warm up". The festival officially starts the following Thursday at the Animal Showgrounds (in recent years simply known as the "Festival Site") and lasts for 4 days.

Until the mid-1990s the festival attracted mostly Scandinavians, but in recent years it has become more and more international (with an especially large influx of Germans, Australians and British).