Forget standing in a paddock 40 minutes outside a major city drinking AU$19 beer.
The best music festivals in the world give you a reason to travel somewhere you probably weren’t going anyway. From dancing to Gnaoua rhythms on Morocco’s Atlantic coast to swapping a festival wristband for hiking boots on an active volcano, these five music festivals come with an epic adventure once the encore is over.
5/ GNAOUA WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL
Essaouira, Morocco
2027 dates: To be announced
Tickets: A mix of free public concerts and ticketed premium areas
Where to Stay: Heure Bleue Palais
The Adventure: Surf the Atlantic Coast
There’s a moment in Essaouira when the sun drops into the Atlantic, the wind finally stops trying to steal your hat and somewhere inside the medina you hear the metallic clack-clack-clack of qraqeb. Follow it.
The Gnaoua World Music Festival has been turning this whitewashed Moroccan port into one enormous jam session since 1998. Its 27th edition ran from 25–27 June 2026, with Gnaoua masters sharing the program with artists including Buika and Saint Levant.
Gnaoua music itself has roots stretching from sub-Saharan Africa into Morocco, combining hypnotic rhythms, chanting, percussion and the three-stringed guembri. At the festival those traditions collide with jazz, blues, rock, gospel and whatever else happens to wander through the gates. And Essaouira is half the show.
Concerts appear around a walled medina wedged against the Atlantic. Fishermen unload their catch beneath circling gulls. Cats operate an apparently sophisticated protection racket around the seafood stalls. The wind barrels down alleyways built centuries before anyone thought to invent festival hair. Then night falls and the city gets loud.
Some performances happen on enormous stages. Others feel like you’ve wandered into something you’re not entirely sure you’re supposed to be watching. But, that’s generally a good sign.
Where to Stay: Heure Bleue Palais
Bed down at Heure Bleue Palais, a 33-room former residence just inside the medina, with a courtyard downstairs and a rooftop pool above it. It provides exactly what you’ll want after several hours of percussion: walls.
The Adventure: Surf the Atlantic Coast
Essaouira is known almost as much for wind as music, which makes the coast prime territory for surfing, windsurfing and kitesurfing. Morocco’s national tourism organisation specifically highlights Essaouira for surfing.
Grab a board after breakfast and head south. Better still, turn the festival into a coastal road trip towards Agadir, following a stretch of wild coves, beaches and small fishing villages along one of Morocco’s great Atlantic coastlines.
Three nights of Gnaoua followed by three days chasing waves. That’s a festival recovery plan we can get behind.
4/ RAINFOREST WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL
Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo
2027 dates: To be announced
Where to Stay: Cove 55
The Adventure: Go Deeper into Borneo
It turns out bands sound better when there’s a 40-million-year-old rainforest behind the stage. Who knew? The Rainforest World Music Festival takes over the Sarawak Cultural Village outside Kuching for three days each year, bringing musicians from around the planet into the jungle at the foot of Mount Santubong. The 2026 edition, the festival’s 29th, ran from 26–28 June under the theme Regenerations: Roots & Rhythms. And world music here actually means world music.
The 2026 program included performers from Malaysia and Sarawak alongside acts from South Korea, Spain’s Basque Country, Benin, France, Indonesia, Mongolia, Japan and the Philippines.
Days are particularly good. Rather than standing around waiting for the headline acts, musicians run workshops and demonstrations where instruments you’ve never seen before are passed around, explained and occasionally handed to someone who absolutely shouldn’t be trusted with them. Then darkness arrives.
The humidity sticks your shirt to your back. Jungle rises behind the stages. Drums start. Thousands of people begin dancing. It’s about as far from watching a DJ beside an airport car park as music festivals get.
Where to Stay: Cover 55
Skip the drive back into Kuching and stay near Santubong. Cove 55 sits between Mount Santubong and the South China Sea, in a property influenced by its Iban heritage.
And there’s an infinity pool. You’ll understand why we’ve mentioned that around 11am on Day Two.
The Adventure: Go Deeper into Borneo
The festival sits beside Santubong National Park, where Mount Santubong delivers one of Sarawak’s more challenging hikes. Pro tip, do it before the festival.
Doing it afterwards assumes significantly greater confidence in your liver.
Then give yourself a few extra days in Sarawak. Kuching is the jumping-off point for some of Borneo’s great wildlife experiences, longhouse country and rainforest adventures.
The equation is wonderfully straightforward: Ancient rainforest + Indigenous music + enormous mountain + Borneo wildlife. You’d travel here without the festival. But the festival is your excuse.
3/ LAKE OF STARS
Nkhotakota, Malawi
2026 dates: 2–4 October
2027 dates: To be announced
Venue: Fish Eagle Bay Lodge, Lake Malawi
Where to Stay: Festival accommodation, then Tongole Wilderness Retreat
The Adventure: Safari in Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve
There’s beachfront. There’s lakefront. And then there’s standing in front of a stage in Malawi, beer in hand, watching musicians perform while one of Africa’s great lakes disappears into the horizon behind them. Welcome to Lake of Stars.
Founded in 2004, the festival has become one of Africa’s best-known cultural gatherings, combining music with dance, theatre, film and visual arts. The 2026 edition runs from 2–4 October at Fish Eagle Bay Lodge in Nkhotakota.
But what makes it special isn’t some enormous international headliner helicoptering in for 75 minutes. It’s Malawi.
Artists from across Africa and beyond mix with Malawian performers, and the festival has always operated as much as a showcase for the country’s creative culture as a giant party. And it’s difficult to complain about festival conditions when you can walk into Lake Malawi between sets.
The lake covers an absurd amount of the country and feels more like an inland ocean. Beaches run into clear water. Fishing boats drift past. Music carries down the shoreline after dark. There aren’t many festivals where packing swimmers is as important as remembering your ticket.
Where to Stay: Tongole Wilderness Retreat
Stay around the festival while it’s on. Then disappear.
Tongole Wilderness Retreat sits inside Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve amid miombo woodland overlooking the Bua River. It’s the reserve’s high-end wilderness option and a perfect antidote to three late nights beside the lake. Although “antidote” may involve an elephant walking past.
The Adventure: Safari in Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve
Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve is one of Malawi’s wildest protected areas. The reserve covers more than 1,800 square kilometres of miombo forest, grassland and river valleys and has undergone a major wildlife restoration program under African Parks. Game drives are available, but this isn’t Serengeti safari traffic.
You can also explore on foot, mountain bike, fish and get out into the wilderness rather than joining a convoy of Land Cruisers photographing the same lion. Which makes Lake of Stars perhaps the perfect get lost festival.
Dance on the beach. Sleep. Go looking for elephants. Repeat as necessary.
2/ BALISPIRIT FESTIVAL
Ubud, Indonesia
2027 dates: To be announced
Location: The Yoga Barn and Puri Padi, Ubud
Where to Stay: Somewhere well away from your mates in Seminyak
The Adventure: Find Bali without a beach club
We appreciate the words Bali wellness festival may cause some readers to involuntarily reach for the back button. Stay with us.
BaliSpirit is considerably more interesting than an enormous group of people discussing magnesium. Held in Ubud, the festival brings together live music, dance, yoga, movement, workshops, healing traditions and a collection of human beings who remembered to stretch before getting on the plane.
The 2026 event ran from 15–19 April, centred around The Yoga Barn and Puri Padi in Ubud. And music is a major part of it.
The festival describes its Grove Main Stage as a gathering point for spiritually inspired artists drawn from around the world, and in practice the programming jumps happily between traditional sounds, electronic music, ecstatic dance, global beats and performers who resist easy categorisation.
It’s weird. And that’s a compliment.
You can start your day doing something alarmingly healthy, spend the afternoon listening to musicians you’ve never heard of and end up dancing barefoot beneath palm trees. And there’s no wristband-sponsored vodka tent.
Where to stay: Ubud
Ubud has approximately 47 billion places to sleep, so don’t automatically book the first international hotel Google serves you.
Find something small among the rice fields on the edge of town. Wake to frogs, roosters and the occasional scooter rather than a breakfast buffet. Ubud works best when you can walk out the gate and immediately get slightly lost.
The Adventure: Find Bali Without a Beach Club
As soon as the festival finishes, point the car west. Not south. Not to Canggu. And definitely not to Seminyak. Drive until the traffic disappears.
About four hours later you’ll arrive in the part of Bali most visitors never see. The island’s wild western tip is protected by West Bali National Park, nearly 19,000 hectares of rainforest, mangroves, savannah and coral reefs that feel a world away from Bali’s southern beach clubs. It’s home to the critically endangered Bali Starling and some of the island’s quietest coastline.
Base yourself in sleepy Pemuteran, where life revolves around fishing boats rather than sunset DJs.
The next morning, jump aboard a small boat to Menjangan Island. The water is impossibly clear. Coral walls plunge into the blue beneath you. Turtles drift past with the sort of indifference reserved for creatures that have absolutely no meetings to attend (lucky bastards).
Menjangan is widely regarded as some of the best snorkelling and diving anywhere in Bali, protected within the national park’s marine reserve. Back on land, spend an afternoon trekking through the national park with a ranger, looking for macaques, rusa deer and the brilliantly white Bali Starling before ending the day with a cold Bintang on Pemuteran Beach.
It’s the complete opposite of the Bali you’ll see on Instagram. And that’s the point.
1/ SAKIFO MUSIK FESTIVAL
Saint-Pierre, Réunion Island
2027 Dates: To be announced
Where to Stay: PALM Hotel & Spa
The Adventure: Hike an Active Volcano and Crawl Through its Lava Tubes
First problem: finding Réunion Island on a map. But, start at Madagascar. Move east.
Stop before you hit Mauritius. There.
This tiny French island in the Indian Ocean is technically part of France, geographically part of Africa and scenically appears to have been designed by someone who thought Hawaii wasn’t dramatic enough. And once a year, it also throws a bloody good music festival.
Sakifo Musik Festival takes over Saint-Pierre on the island’s south coast for three nights. The 2026 festival ran from 5–7 June, with acts including Jean-Louis Aubert, PLK, Helena, Rilès, Asaf Avidan, Magic System, Queen Omega & The Royal Souls and Réunion legends Baster. That lineup tells you plenty about Réunion itself.
This is an island where African, Indian, European, Malagasy and Creole influences have spent centuries colliding, borrowing from one another and producing something entirely their own. Sakifo sounds accordingly difficult to pigeonhole. Reggae appears. Rap appears. Maloya, the island’s traditional music, appears. French pop turns up. African artists arrive from across the ocean. Then everybody stays out late.
The entire thing unfolds around Saint-Pierre, where tropical heat, Creole restaurants and the Indian Ocean make it dangerously easy to forget that the island’s interior is busy doing something completely ridiculous.
Where to Stay: PALM Hotel & Spa
Just outside Saint-Pierre, PALM Hotel & Spa sits above Grande Anse on the gateway to Réunion’s wilder south. It has pools, ocean views and enough comfort to repair most festival-related damage. You’ll need it.
The Adventure: Hike an Active Volcano and Crawl Through its Lava Tubes
The next morning, drive uphill. And keep driving. Eventually the sugarcane and tropical vegetation disappear and the landscape turns red, black and vaguely Martian. Welcome to Piton de la Fournaise.
Réunion’s famous active volcano rises to 2,631 metres, with the Route du Volcan running through increasingly surreal landscapes towards the Pas de Bellecombe viewpoint and trails into the volcanic zone. But don’t just photograph it. Walk it.
Local guides lead small groups across the volcano and into lava tunnels formed by previous eruptions.
If that isn’t enough, Réunion also has canyoning routes involving rappelling down waterfalls and dropping into gorges with names such as Trou de Fer and Takamaka.
This, ultimately, is why Sakifo takes our number-one spot.
You fly to a tiny island most of your friends couldn’t locate on a map. You discover an Indian Ocean music scene you didn’t know existed. You dance for three nights. Then you climb an active volcano.
Coachella can keep its Ferris wheel.
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