The Primavera Sound Festival has been a Barcelona institution since 2001, and it’s earned a reputation as one of the world’s greatest annual music festivals. Primavera Sound expanded to Porto, Portugal in 2012. More recently, there have been Primavera Sound Festivals in Los Angeles, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo. This year, the Primavera Sound Festival held its first-ever edition in Madrid. It will not return.

This past May, the Barcelona and Madrid editions of the Primavera Sound Festival happened on the same weekend and with the same lineups, a bit like Reading and Leeds. Headliners included Kendrick Lamar, Rosalía, Depeche Mode, and Calvin Harris. In a Stereogum interview, Primavera co-director Alfonso Lanza said:

We have also wanted to propose something in Madrid for years. It’s a city we work with all year round with tours, and where we already did editions of our small autumn festival Primavera Club. It has not been possible, for different reasons, to make a Primavera Sound similar in size and ambition to the one in Barcelona until this year. So the double event that took place last year in Barcelona, will now be one weekend in Barcelona and another in Madrid.

But the inaugural Madrid edition of Primavera Sound had problems, and organizers cancelled its first day, affecting headlining sets from Blur and Halsey. The organizers blamed “the persistent severe weather experienced in recent weeks that have affected the pre-production of the festival.”

Now, the Primavera Sound organizers have said, in a press release, that the festival will not return to Madrid next year, making allusions to “annoyances” with the city:

Although both the city of Madrid and the whole region welcomed us with open arms, with a warmth that was mirrored in the institutions, the cultural agents and of course the audience, the external difficulties that the festival had to face in the final stretch of the pre-production gave rise to one of the most complicated events that Primavera Sound has ever had to face. And today, in the run-up to 2024, the city does not have a site able to host an event of this magnitude and format in terms of audience demands, production requirements, and musical show.

“As a consequence, although the evaluation of the festival was more than satisfactory on a musical level, the expectations we had were not fulfilled and the experience of the festivalgoers due to several logistical aspects was not the desired one. Inside the Ciudad del Rock, we experienced a festival full of great musical moments, but we are not oblivious to the annoyances”, said Almudena Heredero, director of Primavera Sound Madrid. “And that leads us to understand that, now, the conditions are not right for Madrid to have a Primavera Sound as it deserves in 2024”.

Next year’s Primavera Sound Barcelona is scheduled to go down from 5/30 to 6/2. No lineup has been announced yet.