Yes, there’s a new festival coming to “the Toronto area” this summer.
Or, well, they were calling it the Toronto area when rumours first started to spread – but it’s actually happening just outside Barrie.
The Burls Creek Event Grounds are about an hour and a half drive north of Toronto, and on July 24th-26th there will be a massive surge of traffic in the area as thousands of us head there to get our summer festival on.
The festival itself doesn’t have a name yet, but their working name was HomeAway – fitting, considering most attendees will probably be coming in from elsewhere. However, parties in the know have confirmed it will not be called that, and so far they’ve remained quiet on the official name.
While the lineup hasn’t been confirmed either, we can definitely start speculating who might be on the bill based on the Coachella, Governors Ball, and Bonnaroo lineups.
Looks like it’s safe to call Drake a good bet, even though his own festival will happen in Toronto just weeks later.
Canadian organizers Republic Live (who run the Boots and Hearts country music festival) have teamed up with Nashville’s Ashley Capps – whose AC Entertainment co-founded Bonnaroo back in 2002 – to bring this camping festival to Ontario.
“The dream for this whole thing began when a small group of us attended Bonnaroo in 2011 and had the best musical experience of our lives,” noted Shannon McNevan, Executive Director of Republic Live, in a press statement. “As soon as we got home we started wondering why we didn’t have anything like it here in Canada.”
The three-day event is said to have four stages, original art installations, an onsite farmers market, and a “late night forest” – whatever that means…
Basically, it should be the hipster paradise we’ve all come to expect from big music festivals.
The 700-acre grounds will hold around 80,000 people – more than double what Toronto festival venues Fort York and Downsview Park are able to accommodate.
With room for only 45,000 campers, however, some people will have to find accommodation off-site – for those who don’t enjoy sleeping in tents with bugs, that may not be such a bad thing.
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Cover image from: istock.com/monkeybusinessimages
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