Pinkpop Festival - Netherlands’ largest outdoor music festival

The Netherlands holds its largest and oldest outdoor music festival of the year in June, and even though it’s not terribly close to Amsterdam itself, it’s fairly easy to reach and quite popular with both Amsterdammers and tourists to the capital. The event has been held every year since 1970 except 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic cancelled it. It was traditionally held on Pentecost/Whitsun weekend (7 weeks after Easter), but it now usually lands in mid to late June: the 2026 edition ran June 19 to 21, and the 2027 dates are June 18 to 20.

The festival

Spread over 3 days (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) the Pinkpop Festival features 4 stages running more or less concurrently. Some of the biggest names on the international touring scene mix with some Dutch stars and lesser-known acts in a lineup that rivals the other top music festivals in Europe. The event is broadcast live on Dutch TV if you can’t be one of the 100,000-plus visitors counted over the course of the long weekend.

Location

The Pinkpop Festival is held in the small Dutch town of Landgraaf, which is about 200 kilometers south of Amsterdam and very near the city of Heerlen, and also near the borders of Germany and Belgium.

Getting there

From Amsterdam the train journey takes about 2 hours and 40 minutes. You’ll take a direct train to Heerlen and then transfer to a local train to Landgraaf for a 5-minute ride to the station nearest the festival grounds. Once at the Landgraaf train station, you can get a special shuttle bus to either the festival site or the campgrounds, or you can make the 10-minute walk yourself. A full-fare 2nd class ticket costs about €32 one-way as of 2026, and a return is simply double that, whether you come back the same day or not.

Getting tickets

For 2026, a single-day admission ticket cost €155 and a full weekend 3-day ticket cost €305, and the weekend ticket is the one that includes the regular festival campsites. Tickets are sold through Ticketmaster, and the Pinkpop site links to the sale.

Since the Weekend Tickets are a relative bargain and also include free camping, they sell out before the individual day tickets do. Even with 3 individual day tickets, you will not be allowed to camp in the site.

2008 lineup

The 2008 Pinkpop Festival was held on May 30, 31, and June 1, with 39 acts on 3 stages over the weekend.

Friday May 30 headliners:
Metallica, Incubus, Flogging Molly

Saturday May 31 headliners:
Foo Fighters, Kaiser Chiefs, Editors, KT Tunstall, Moke

Sunday June 1 headliners:
Rage Against the Machine, Queens of the Stone Age, Alanis Morissette, Racoon, Gavin DeGraw, Fiction Plane

There were many other notable acts on the other stages that year, including The Verve, Stereophonics, Bad Religion, Hives, Groove Armada, and Kate Nash to name just a few. For the current lineup, check the Pinkpop site.

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