Tomorrowland is a large electronic music festival held each summer in Boom, a small town between Antwerp and Brussels, famous for stages built like fantasy film sets.
Its beginnings were modest. The brothers Manu and Michiel Beers, who had organised student parties in Antwerp, staged the first edition as a one-day event on 14 August 2005 in the De Schorre recreation park, drawing fewer than ten thousand people after plastering posters across the chip shops of Flanders. The ticket sale is now a ritual of its own: for the 2012 edition’s international presale, some two million people were reported to be online for one hundred thousand tickets, which were said to have gone in about a second. Visitors arrive carrying flags from dozens of countries, which makes the crowd look like a very cheerful United Nations.