Universo Paralello Festival (Pratigi Beach, Ituberá, Brazil) 2026

Universo Paralello holds its nineteenth edition from 27 December 2026 to 4 January 2027 on Praia de Pratigi, a stretch of coconut plantation and hidden beach on the Dendê Coast in the municipality of Ituberá, about 290 kilometres south of Salvador in Bahia. The organisers put the scale of the site at roughly 500,000 square metres with a four kilometre perimeter, staffed by around 2,000 people, and count more than 1,000 artists across eight days and over 200 hours of continuous music.

Seven stages carry the programme and five of them sit directly on the sand. The Main Floor is the psytrance heart of the festival and the point where the crowd gathers at its densest, backed by the 303 Stage on the same sound. Palco Paralello widens the range into chillout, reggae, MPB, rap and hip hop, UP Beach Club and Artboat handle house and techno, and Tropikalien buries dark psytrance in the forest at the ocean’s edge. Artboat is built around a salvaged boat planted in the sand and doubles as an art installation, which is closer to how the festival treats its whole site than any conventional beach music festival would attempt.

The event traces back to 1997, when Juarez Petrillo, known as Swarup, and a group of friends staged a small trance party to see in the new year. The first proper festival edition followed in 2000 at Chapada dos Veadeiros, and in 2003 it moved to Praia de Pratigi. A political dispute pushed it briefly to Praia dos Garcez in 2009 before it returned to Pratigi for good in 2012. Running alongside the music is Circulou, a social and cultural project active since 2004 that programmes circus, cinema, urban art, therapies, an indigenous culture space and a children’s area. Tickets are sold in batches through Ingresse, and camping runs on site with Villa Mundo as the paid option.