LongLake Festival

LongLake Festival is a jazz, indie and pop festival in Lugano, in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland. The first edition ran in 2011. The Divisione Eventi e congressi of the Città di Lugano organises it. The venue is the lakeside walk, Piazza della Riforma and Parco Ciani, on Lake Lugano, the Ceresio. Claudio Chiapparino, then head of the Dicastero Giovani ed Eventi and later artistic director, shaped the date after a summer in Edinburgh. The name is a loose, deliberately clumsy English take on «lungolago». Most of the programme is free. A few special shows are ticketed so the rest can stay open. The city closes the promenade to cars and you walk between stages, food stalls and the water.

Before the festival, Lugano already shut the lungolago on summer weekends. People came out on bikes, skates or on foot, and after the novelty faded they said an empty street was not enough. Chiapparino told Libera TV that more impact was needed and that Edinburgh’s August festival gave him the model: occupy the centre for weeks, not one weekend. In 2013, the third edition, the programme lasted a month and held about 250 events on a budget of one million francs. A standing team of around twenty people coordinated students and young staff on the doors. The Mojito bar, run by the department itself, put takings back into the organisation. The municipality wanted young people to organise and residents and tourists to use the city. The link between the events office and tourism started there. Ticino stopped being only a corridor toward Italy or the Alps.

The music rests on dates that already existed in Lugano and that LongLake later sheltered. Estival Jazz, founded in 1979 by Jacky Marti and Andreas Wyden, entered the summer calendar when the City stepped in to stop its closure and took over production. For years jazz nights filled Piazza della Riforma under an open sky, with chairs in the square and no box office. Later the formula shifted: some nights became ticketed and the bill opened toward singer-songwriters and pop. The Boschetto in Parco Ciani holds quieter evenings. The official programme has placed Motta there in a piano-solo set and MILLE, who crosses rock, theatre and stage electronics. Italian indie and pop fit that lakeside wood. Buskers work the centre. Plaza jazz and park songwriting do not cancel each other: you walk both in the same July. LongLake did not invent those scenes; it put them under one municipal roof.

The format is urban and long. You do not buy a wristband for a campsite. You enter and leave the city. People who live in Lugano treat the festival as an extension of summer. People coming by train from Zurich, Milan or Locarno step out of the station and reach the lake in a few minutes. Boats on the Ceresio and city buses tie neighbourhoods to the shore. By day Parco Ciani is shade, grass and families; the Family section programmes workshops and shows for every age. In the afternoon the lungolago fills with food stalls and people sitting on the wall. At night Piazza della Riforma holds Estival Jazz headliners while the rest of the centre continues with theatre, Words talks and urban art. ROAM and OFF open other slots. Most acts ask for no ticket. That changes who stands there: neighbours with a stroller, tourists without a plan and people who stop because a set reaches the pavement. July heat by the water is easier than heat in a concrete yard. If it rains, the square gets wet and part of the plan moves; the lake stays.

The contradiction is scale and price. LongLake presents itself as one of Switzerland’s largest urban open-airs and, at the same time, you walk most of the map without a ticket. Chiapparino said a million francs, spent elsewhere in three days, stretches here across weeks. Savings go into production and word of mouth. The movida effect, he argued, also helps bars that are not the Mojito: people come for the shore, not for one room. Over time the programme tightened: from a full month it moved to a denser July stretch, with hundreds of concerts, plays, installations and street acts. Teatrionline counted more than three hundred activities in one of those editions, when Estival Jazz and the buskers already shared the calendar with the other sections. The City, Lugano Region and local associations remain the frame. A municipal service uses the geography of the Ceresio.

Lugano fits the walk from the station to the square to the park. LongLake exists because that distance is short and because the lake makes you look at the water while jazz or a piano plays in the Boschetto. The clumsy English name is a shoreline joke, not an imported brand. After more than a decade, what remains is a city that closes the lungolago and turns it into a stage: Estival Jazz in Piazza della Riforma, songwriters in Parco Ciani, buskers in the centre, and an audience that does not need a wristband for most of the summer. The Ceresio is not a backdrop. It is the festival’s edge.