From a quarry to a two-weekend phenomenon

Brothers Manu and Michiel Beers staged the first Tomorrowland in 2005 at De Schorre, a Boom, Belgium park built around disused clay pits, drawing about 10,000 people. Attendance climbed fast: 90,000 by 2009, 180,000 in 2010, and by 2017 the festival had expanded to two full weekends, selling 400,000 tickets across both. The site now spreads across 34 hectares and 16 stages.

A new stage, a new story, every year

Since 2009 Tomorrowland has rebuilt its mainstage from scratch every year, designed around that year's festival theme, past examples including The Book of Wisdom and The Elixir of Life. Attendees camp on-site at DreamVille, which has grown to seven separate camping areas ranging from basic tent sites to a luxury tier called Terra Soils. The festival treats its audience as a single global community under the banner People of Tomorrow, a framing reinforced by Global Journey travel packages that have flown thousands of fans in from dozens of cities since 2012.

The year the mainstage burned down

Two days before the 2025 festival opened, an ethanol leak during a subcontractor's pyrotechnic test set fire to the half-built mainstage, destroying a structure built largely from polystyrene and wood. Nobody was hurt. Organizers rebuilt a smaller, more intimate stage in time for opening night, borrowing speaker rigs previously used for Metallica shows, and the festival ran as planned across its other fifteen unaffected stages.