The Right to the Outdoors

I'm back from Barcelona, where Primavera Pro — the industry conference that runs alongside Primavera Sound — brought together over 3,200 music professionals for three days of debate about where the live music sector is heading. Amid panels on AI, rights management and the global rise of African music, one session stayed with me longer than the rest: a discussion on acoustic regulation that, almost by accident, turned into a conversation about who gets to use the outdoor space of a city, and on what terms.

The starting premise was familiar. Festivals generate noise; noise disturbs residents; residents organise. At Parc del Fòrum — Primavera Sound's home for two decades — a residents' platform called Stop Concerts has spent years campaigning against the festival's impact on the surrounding neighbourhoods, at one point pursuing legal action aimed at shutting down one of its stages. It's a story that will be recognisable from almost any city that hosts outdoor events: the right to rest versus the right to make, and hear, music.

What made this particular discussion different was the way one speaker reframed it. Lluís Torrents — co-director of Razzmatazz and president of the Associació de Sales de Concerts de Catalunya (ASACC) — argued that residents' right to rest is not the only right in play. The Spanish Constitution, he pointed out, also protects "the right to artistic production and creation" (Article 20.2) and commits public authorities to "promote and safeguard access to culture, to which everyone is entitled" (Article 44). The lawyer Belén Álvarez, also on the panel, took this further: the articles of the Constitution covering fundamental rights receive special protection, and when a resident's right to an inviolable home collides with an audience's or an artist's right to cultural participation, the law has so far had no consistent mechanism for weighing one against the other.

This is the "cultural rights" framing Torrents put forward — not a dismissal of residents' grievances, but an insistence that culture is itself a right, and one too often treated as the most dispensable item on the list when rights collide.

What's striking is how quickly this single dispute scaled into something much larger. The trigger was what panellists called "the Bernabéu effect": after acoustic complaints around Madrid's Santiago Bernabéu stadium, courts began holding the municipal administration — not just event promoters — liable for noise generated at venues they had licensed. Catalan regulators, anticipating similar exposure, began drafting a highly restrictive noise decree to limit their own liability. But ASACC pointed out an inconvenient consequence: in Catalonia, the largest single promoter of outdoor music isn't a private company — it's the public administration itself, through Festes de Gràcia, Festes de Sants, the Mercat de Música Viva de Vic, and the dozens of Festes Majors (and New Year's Eve gatherings) that structure the Catalan civic calendar. A decree designed to rein in festivals like Primavera Sound would, almost incidentally, have made much of the city's own traditional festive life illegal.

That paradox — local government nearly legislating itself out of its own festive calendar — is what forced the issue back onto the table. After several years of negotiation, Catalonia has reportedly reached the basis of a new noise decree, due to take effect next year. Its key innovation is procedural rather than numerical: rather than a blanket cap, decisions to restrict an event will require a "balancing judgment" (juicio de ponderación) weighing residents' rights against cultural rights case by case. Álvarez framed this as a precedent Catalonia might set for the rest of Spain, linking it to the 2023 Cáceres Declaration, in which EU culture ministries committed to treating culture as an essential public good. Technology is doing some of the work too: directional sound systems, discussed at the same conference by the consultancy Axioma, can now aim sound at an audience rather than letting it spill into neighbouring streets — making traditional decibel limiters look almost redundant for a festival the size of Primavera Sound.

None of this guarantees a happy ending elsewhere. Days before Primavera Pro convened, Valencia's Festival de les Arts had its second day cancelled outright after losing a court case over noise — a reminder of what happens when this balance is never struck. Primavera Sound itself closed its 2026 edition with attendance slightly down on the previous year, but having just secured a new agreement to remain at Parc del Fòrum until 2030.

So: how do we strike the right balance, and how do we protect the value of festivals? The Barcelona case suggests one answer — not by pretending the tension between rest and revelry can be engineered away, but by building legal, technological and political mechanisms sophisticated enough to weigh both seriously. The "right to the outdoors" turns out to be plural: a city's public space is claimed simultaneously by those who live beside it and those who animate it, often for only a handful of nights a year. Getting that balance right isn't a side issue for cultural policy — for cities that depend on festivals, Festes Majors and New Year's Eve crowds alike, it is cultural policy, worked out at the level of decibels.

Dr Beatriz Garcia, Chair, Walk the Plank and International expert on mega events, cities & culture | LinkedIn | Website | Author Euphoric Cities