Boom Festival
In August 1997 a few thousand people gathered in a forest at Herdade do Zambujal, south of Lisbon, for a Goa trance party that lasted several days. Boom has since become one of the most-copied templates in festival culture: a week-long gathering on the shore of a Portuguese reservoir, built around a main stage called the Dance Temple, a talks and workshops programme called Liminal Village, and an approach to sustainability that is unusually specific for an industry that mostly gestures at it. Compost toilets counted and reported, greywater treated on site, structures dismantled and reused rather than burned. Its harm-reduction service, Kosmicare, has produced nine peer-reviewed papers, including the finding that of 245 samples sold as LSD at Boom 2014, barely two thirds were actually LSD. This archive follows the festival from that first forest to the present: the editions and their films, the Dance Temple, the art and architecture that gets built and taken down again, the ideas programme, and the people who camp by the lake every other July.
A chronological documentary of 1,177 moments spanning 1997–2026 on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-09-02
Eras
- Life by the Lake, The festival from inside: the campsites, the reservoir and its shoreline, the walk between stages, costume and decoration, and the ordinary business of living in a temporary town for a week in the Portuguese summer heat.
- The Editions, One gathering every other year, and the films the festival makes of itself. The first three editions were held in the forest at Herdade do Zambujal in Setubal, from 1997; Idanha-a-Nova has been the site since 2002. Boom did not produce an edition film until 2004, so the earliest years survive only as attendee camcorder footage, which makes that material more valuable rather than less. Note that 2022 and 2023 both happened, which breaks the neat biennial story most sources tell.
- The Dance Temple, The main stage and the music. Boom sits in the Goa and psytrance lineage that ran from the beaches of Anjuna to the Portuguese forests, and the Dance Temple is where that lineage is most visible: a built structure that changes every edition, a sound system pointed at a hillside of people, and sets that run through the night into the morning.
- Art and Architecture, The thing Boom is most imitated for. Large-scale installations, sculpture, painted structures, timber and earth architecture, and stages that take months to build. Nothing is burned at the end, which distinguishes it from the festival it is most often compared to: the ethos is dismantle, store and reuse, and open flame is banned outright for fire risk.
- Boomland and Beyond, The festival in its place and in the world: Idanha-a-Nova and the reservoir, the Boomland site bought by crowdfunding in 2016 and held by a non-profit, the municipality relationship, press coverage, and the arguments that surround it.
- How It Is Built, The infrastructure, reported in unusual detail. Dry compost toilets counted per edition, greywater treated on site, bio-construction, solar, and a Greener Festival Award at Outstanding tier in 2018 plus a Water and Sanitation Award in 2026, both verified on the awarding body rather than taken from the festival. Where a claim is self-reported and unaudited, this archive says so.
- Liminal Village, The ideas programme: talks, workshops, films and the healing area. It also holds Kosmicare, the on-site psychedelic harm-reduction service, which is the most academically serious thing about the festival. Its drug-checking work has produced nine peer-reviewed papers, including the finding that of 245 samples sold as LSD at Boom 2014, only 67.3% were LSD and nearly a tenth were NBOMe compounds.
…and 1,177 more moments. Full text archive: /loreline-text/boom-festival.md
