Parookaville Festival

Where Parookaville happens.

Where is Parookaville? The Parookaville location is Weeze Airport, in the district of Kleve in North Rhine-Westphalia, close to the border with the Netherlands. The airport sits about 33 kilometres south-east of Nijmegen and 48 kilometres north-west of Duisburg, and it uses the buildings of RAF Laarbruch, a Royal Air Force base that became a civilian airport in 2003. The festival is on that old military airfield, which is why it turns up in listings as Parookaville Weeze.

Some of the base is part of the show. The Cloud Factory stage is built into an old hangar, and the Power Plant and the Time Lab stages are in former aircraft shelters.

When is Parookaville? Every year in the middle of July, over three days from Friday to Sunday. In 2026 that was 17 to 19 July. It is for adults only: the festival's terms admit ticket holders who are 18 or over, and ask for a printed ticket and valid ID at the first entry.

How big Parookaville is.

Parookaville capacity is about 75,000 people a day, the figure reported for 2024 and 2025, and the festival reports 225,000 admissions across its three days. The Mainstage alone holds 45,000.

Those totals count admissions, not people: someone with a weekend ticket is counted once for each day they come in. That is why the tickets and the totals in the table below are so far apart. In 2019 about 85,000 tickets were sold and more than 210,000 entries were counted, with some 70,000 people on site each day.

The first edition, by Pollstar's account, was a 25,000-capacity event. Ticket sales more than tripled in four years, and since the pandemic the festival has held its admissions at 225,000.

The audience at home is bigger again. Since 2019 the festival has streamed on YouTube, and for that first year Wikipedia's German article reports 7.5 million viewers.

A short history, and who owns Parookaville.

Parookaville was started by Bernd Dicks, a former reporter for the German radio station 1Live, with Norbert Bergers and Georg van Wickeren. The first edition opened on 17 July 2015, with Armin van Buuren, Alesso, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike and Steve Aoki at the top of the bill, and counted 40,000 admissions. The next year the count doubled, and a second big stage, Bill's Factory, opened.

The third edition, in 2017, ended in mud. Heavy rain on the Sunday evening held up the departure of about 80,000 fans, and farmers from the area towed stuck cars out with tractors, free of charge. The next morning about 8,000 cars were still on the camping ground, and around 100 of them were in too deep for the tractors. The following summer brought the opposite: in 2018 the groundwater was so low that water on the site was at times restricted.

Who owns Parookaville? Its founders' company. In August 2019 Superstruct Entertainment, a festival group whose other events then included Sziget in Hungary and Sónar in Spain, entered an investment and partnership agreement with Next Events, the company behind Parookaville. The terms were not disclosed, and Dicks, Bergers and van Wickeren stayed in charge. The festival's ticket terms now name Parookaville GmbH, based in Weeze, as the organiser.

The 2020 edition was cancelled for the pandemic. In its place the festival built a small part of its city on the site for two nights, LIVE from the City, with 100 guests a night drawn by lottery and the sets streamed. Seven in ten ticket holders kept their tickets for the next year. In early May 2021 that edition was cancelled too and moved to 22 to 24 July 2022, when Parookaville came back at 225,000 admissions.

Why Parookaville is famous.

Parookaville is famous first for being a city. The festival presents itself as the City of Dreams, built by Bill Parooka, a fictional architect and time traveller whose one rule is that madness, love and pure happiness should reign. Tickets are called visas, and the people who buy them are its citizens. There is a town hall where passports are stamped, a church, a post office with its own Deutsche Post postmark, a bank for festival tokens and a jail that houses a tattoo studio.

The church is real enough for a wedding. Every year a couple is legally married there before the festival opens. In 2017 the festival's wedding was billed as the only legally binding festival wedding in Germany, and in 2019 a same-sex couple was married there for the first time.

The second is the stages. The Parookaville Mainstage is redesigned every year: in 2024 it was a greenhouse, a glass dome among plants and waterfalls, and in 2025 an old British-style steam locomotive. Around it are Bill's Factory, the home of the city's founder in the story, dressed with chimneys and gears; the Cloud Factory, with clouds that light up to the beat; the Power Plant, powered in the story by giant Tesla coils; the Time Lab; the open-air Desert Valley; and Brain Wash, a small stage in a bunker made up as an oversized washing machine.

The third is its record. In its first year Parookaville won Festival of the Year at the LEA awards and Best National Festival at the Helga! awards, and it was nominated at the European Festival Awards in the years from 2015 to 2019. In DJ Mag's Top 100 Festivals it was 15th in 2019 and 13th in 2024, and in 2026 it climbed eight places to 10th, in the year Tomorrowland was first, EDC Las Vegas second and Creamfields seventh.

The music

What the music actually is.

Parookaville books the European festival mainstream, and a lot of it. The 2015 headliners were Armin van Buuren, Alesso, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike and Steve Aoki. Martin Garrix, Hardwell and Zedd headlined in 2018, The Chainsmokers, Alan Walker, Above & Beyond and KSHMR in 2019, Hardwell, Kygo and Alok in 2023. The 2026 edition announced about 300 acts, with Armin van Buuren, Charlotte de Witte, The Chainsmokers and Timmy Trumpet at the top.

Techno has a corner of its own. Paul Kalkbrenner headlined in 2017 and 2024, Amelie Lens and Fisher in 2022, Boris Brejcha in 2024, and the Cocoon label has hosted a stage. Other stages go to hosts from the radio station 1Live and the Cologne club Bootshaus to Spinnin' Records and I AM Hardstyle.

The festival films nearly all of it, and its own YouTube channel shows what the crowd goes back to. The most watched sets there are not always the headliners': Finch's 2022 set has 1,246,324 views, and Gestört aber Geil's from 2024 has 1,021,261. Hardstyle has a resident, Lost Identity, and a steady place on the bill, from Brennan Heart to Headhunterz and Wildstylez.

Paul Elstak is the hardest end of it. He is a Dutch hardcore, gabber and happy hardcore DJ who has been playing since 1987, and his 2022 set on the festival's channel has 728,553 views.

Drum and bass is a guest here. Pendulum were on the 2026 bill, listed by the festival under drum and bass, and the channel carries bass sets such as Modestep, Barely Alive and Virtual Riot from 2019, but none of the stage hosts is a drum and bass label or night. For a listener who comes from breaks, jungle or drum and bass, that is the honest picture: Parookaville is not a festival for this music. The nearest thing on its bill is the hardcore, and it is a distant relative. Dutch gabber and the UK's breakbeat hardcore, which jungle came out of, both grew from the rave of the early nineties before one went to the kick drum and the other to the break.

Hearing Parookaville from home.

Parookaville puts its sets online. The festival's channel has a playlist of full DJ sets for every edition since 2017, and many artists post their own. None of the 62,877 DJ sets behind the Selector is from Parookaville, so the players here come from those channels.

The two below are the most watched. W&W's 2022 set is the most watched on the festival's own channel, at 1,257,135 views; the Dutch duo have played Parookaville again and again, and their 2023 and 2024 sets are among the channel's most watched too. Steve Aoki, who headlined the first edition in 2015, posted his 2025 set on his own channel, where it has about 1.7 million views, more than any other Parookaville set we found.

Parookaville's founders took Tomorrowland as one of their models, and Burning Man as another; our guides cover both, and EDC Las Vegas and Creamfields, its neighbours in the 2026 chart. For where drum and bass comes from, read the drum and bass guide. And the Selector plays one full DJ set at random from 62,877, if you would rather not choose.