Dreambeach

Dreambeach grew up facing the Mediterranean. For more than a decade, the festival was inseparable from Villaricos-Palomares, a stretch of the Almería coast where tens of thousands of people could spend several days moving between enormous stages, campsites, beaches and nights that lasted well beyond sunrise. The project began in 2013 with a two-day debut attended by more than 60,000 people, but its ambition quickly outgrew the scale of a specialist electronic gathering. Techno, EDM, drum & bass, dubstep, trance, hardstyle, breakbeat and hip hop all found space within an increasingly huge programme. Dreambeach eventually became one of the defining electronic-music weekends of the Spanish summer.

Its origins are directly connected to Creamfields Andalucía. Grupo Hermanos Toro had spent years working with that international festival brand before relaunching the operation under its own identity in 2013. Dreambeach Villaricos therefore inherited experience, an established electronic audience and a location already familiar with large-scale events, but it deliberately began its own edition count. The Prodigy, Loco Dice, Vitalic, Pendulum, Camo & Krooked, Feed Me, Laidback Luke, Josh Wink, Ben Sims, Chris Liebing and Noisia helped define the first weekend. That combination was revealing: spectacular crossover bookings could occupy the main stage while techno, drum & bass and more underground strains retained significant territory elsewhere.

Growth in Villaricos was extraordinary. One hundred thousand people attended in 2015, more than 160,000 in 2016, and the fifth anniversary in 2017 reached roughly 175,000 across six days. By then Dreambeach was functioning less like a sequence of concerts than a temporary coastal town. Camping was central rather than optional. Tents, beach time, long walks through the site and the social hours between sets were as important to many visitors as individual DJs. The festival’s term for its audience —“dreamers”— increasingly made sense as an expression of belonging. For several days, the site developed its own routines and social geography, with the Mediterranean always present beyond the lights and sound systems.

Musical breadth became one of the festival’s greatest strengths. Axwell /\ Ingrosso, Martin Garrix, Hardwell and David Guetta could represent the scale and spectacle of mainstream electronic music; Richie Hawtin, Ricardo Villalobos, Carl Cox, Adam Beyer, Marco Carola and Solomun connected the programme to multiple generations of techno and house; Pendulum, Noisia, Sub Focus and Dimension kept bass culture and drum & bass firmly embedded in the festival’s history. Hardstyle, dubstep, breakbeat and rap regularly appeared around them. Dreambeach was never interested in genre purity. Its attraction lay in the possibility of leaving an enormous production, walking across the site and entering a completely different room dominated by harder, deeper or faster music.

The original era reached another high point in 2019. The seventh edition drew around 160,000 admissions and featured Armin van Buuren, Steve Aoki, Don Diablo, Paul Kalkbrenner, Adam Beyer, Seth Troxler, Steve Angello, Fisher, Stephan Bodzin and Marco Carola. Then the pandemic broke the annual sequence. There was no regular 2020 edition, while a special 2021 Dreambeach event in Granada brought Armin van Buuren, Netsky, 999999999 and I Hate Models to ten thousand people without being counted as the next main edition. The real return came in 2022 at Villaricos-Palomares, drawing around 110,000, while another special Dreambeach date in El Puerto de Santa María demonstrated that the brand could travel without creating a new independent festival every time.

The ninth edition in 2023 became the farewell to Villaricos. Around 135,000 people attended the final main festival on the landscape that had defined Dreambeach since 2013. For its tenth edition the following year, the event moved to Retamar–El Toyo in the municipality of Almería. The relocation did not reset anything: 2024 was explicitly the tenth anniversary edition. David Guetta, Timmy Trumpet, Nico Moreno, R3HAB, W&W, Brennan Heart, Paco Osuna and Loco Dice helped introduce the new home. In 2025, more than 90,000 people returned to Retamar for Will Smith, Fatboy Slim, Steve Angello, Sub Focus, Dimension, Amelie Lens, Ben Klock and another programme that continued to move freely between mass appeal and specialist club culture.

Another major shift followed in 2026. Dreambeach left Almería province altogether and moved west to Vélez-Málaga, promoting its new phase as Dreambeach Costa del Sol. The twelfth edition compressed the festival into two intense nights on July 31 and August 1, using four stages at the Vélez-Málaga fairgrounds. Eric Prydz, Nico Moreno and a rare Sasha & John Digweed appearance led Friday, while David Guetta presented his Monolith show on Saturday alongside Loco Dice, Luciano, Paco Osuna, Korolova, Brennan Heart, Mathame, Nicole Moudaber and SNTS. Techno, hard techno, drum & bass, breakbeat, house and bass music remained visible despite the radically shorter format.

The Costa del Sol move revealed how far the festival’s identity had detached itself from a single beach. Villaricos was foundational and Retamar provided a second home, but the edition count never broke: Dreambeach carried its audience, programming philosophy and production language with it. No 2027 edition has yet been officially confirmed, but the 2026 event completed successfully and established Málaga as the latest chapter of the story. After twelve main editions, Dreambeach can no longer be understood simply as the festival from Villaricos. It is the continuity between those places —a Spanish electronic institution built around the unlikely coexistence of main-stage spectacle, dark techno rooms and the restless bass culture that has run through its history from the beginning.