Farewell to the Fòrum as an eternal party zone… at least for 350 days a year. The Barcelona City Council has just announced a new plan to regulate festivals and concerts in the Parc del Fòrum from 2026 with a star condition: limiting the nights with music from 23h. to only 15 a year, in addition to other restrictions.
The idea is to improve coexistence between festivals and residents of the Sant Martí district, who have complained in recent years about the accumulation of events and noise at night.
What are the main changes
The new plan for the Forum maintains the current limit of 30 days of performances per year, but establishes new time restrictions and selection criteria . This halves the current conditions, which allow 30 days of performances per year, and calls into question the future of the festivals currently held at the venue.
The main novelty is that only 15 nights a month will be able to have concerts after 11pm. The other 15 nights may have concerts, but only until 11pm.
This count excludes the April Fair of the Forum, which has its own regulations.
In addition to these measures, it will be sought to space the events to avoid consecutive weekends with musical activity and will be studied to extend the restrictions on the sale of alcohol and the closure of terraces during all festivals within a radius of one kilometer.
Which festivals will be maintained?
At the moment, it is known that the most relevant festivals in the precinct, Primavera Sound and Cruïlla, will keep their assigned days until 2026, when their contracts will be reviewed. Of the 15 days that can exceed 23:00 hours, 6 are reserved for these two festivals.
From 2025, a public tender will be opened to allocate the remaining 9 days that may have night concerts, and will seek that the projects meet criteria such as sustainability, the quality of the proposal, the roots of the promoter in the city or the commitment to the programming of local artists.