The Paléo Festival de Nyon, usually just called Paléo,[1] is an annual rock festival held in Nyon, Switzerland.[2] It started in a small way in 1976 as the Nyon Folk Festival. The first one was held in the village hall in Nyon. From 1977 until 1989, it was held at Colovray, Nyon, by 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. In 1990, it moved to its current location, at 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.
Stages
The Paléo features six stages:
La Grande Scène (the Main Stage)
Vega (Which replaced Les Arches in 2022)
Le Club Tent (the Club Tent)
La Ruche (the hive) (formerly called 'La Crique')
Le Dôme (the Dome)
Belleville (since 2022, dedicated to electronic music)
Le Détour (regional bands now located inside the festival, formerly called 'FMR' which was a free stage)
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
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.
That year was considered very successful, with a cool but clear weather for most of the week (except some short showers on Sunday).
Asia was the region invited to the Village du Monde, including China, Tibet, Nepal, Vietnam, Thailand and Japan.
The 2011 edition of the Paléo Festival took place from Tuesday, July the 19th to Sunday, July the 24th. The following list includes some of the acts that were confirmed on the 5th of April:
