Vagos Open Air

Where the heck is Vagos? It’s a small town/village in Portugal about an hour away from Porto, 15 km from the tourist town of Aveiro. A few years ago, someone came upon the idea to hold a heavy metal festival there and Vagos Open Air quickly became Portugal’s biggest heavy metal festival.

Getting there from Barcelona proved to be less easy than I thought. I had booked a flight with Vueling from Barcelona to Porto and intended to go to Aveiro where my hotel was via train. But, arriving at the airport, I had to discover that my flight did not exist. I had booked it in May, or was it April? A dude at the ticket counter said they sent me an email in June that the flight was cancelled, which I strongly believe landed in the spam folder along with the many advertisement emails from vueling….. Interesting that I could print out a boarding pass end of July for a flight that doesn’t exist. At least then the system should have told me, hey, something’s wrong… Anyway. Luckily I could book a flight with TAP Portugal for a few minutes later and flew to Lisbon instead of Porto.

In Lisbon I went to the train station Oriente and after some longish searching for an open ticket counter booked my trains throughout the Portugal journey. The ride to Aveiro took some two hours and fifteen minutes but eventually I got there, and also found my hotel.

Checking out the Vagos schedule, I found myself with too much time on my hands on the 7th of August, since the venue would open only at 15:00 and so I did some Aveiro sightseeing, including a boat ride on its canals and a nice walk though the historical part of town with its cute churches and colorfully painted and tiled houses. Aveiro is a nice place indeed.



Then I looked for the bus to Vagos. A lost girl from Lisbon approached me looking for the same bus who spoke excellent English, and so we checked out the bus stuff together. Vagos is a bit in the middle of nowhere and the festival site is so cute and small compared to the Wacken monstrosity. So far Vagos is the smallest festival I went to. My estimation is it has somewhere between a thousand to three thousand visitors??? Not sure though.

Since the Lisbon girl met friends at Vagos, we separated at the entrance.



The bands on the first day were: Scar for Life and Moonshade from Portugal, Vildhjarta from Sweden, Heaven Shall Burn, Amorphis and Within Temptation.

The gig of Heaven Shall Burn was pure madness. I made my way to the front, since I wanted to get a good spot for Amorphis, and was right in the middle of the craze of crowd diving without pause and mosh pits without mercy. Only the first two rows or so were spared from “circle pits” and “walls of death”. The security guys had a tough job hauling all those people over the banister of the first row. Crazy. But it also helped against the cold to be where the action happened, yes, cold! It was freezing in Vagos. Brutally hot in the sun, but an astonishingly icy wind blew full throttle the whole day and as soon as the sun went down temperatures dropped to some ten or fifteen Celsius at best plus windchill. Weird! It’s August! I’m in Portugal! How can it be cold?

Between stage change over from Heaven Shall Burn to Amorphis, I talked to a group of kids in the first row, all Portuguese, all speaking excellent English, who kindly let me squeeze into the first row too. Metal heads are just awesome

The Amorphis gig at Vagos was leagues better than in Wacken. Better sound and the band had more fun with it too, since the audience was very into it and crowd surfing again like mad, if luckily not at my corner to the right. In Wacken they are just one band among many, in Vagos they were close to headlining (headliner was Within Temptation that day).

The gig was excellent.



Then I faced the dreadful task of finding a taxi to bring me to my hotel in Aveiro 15km away. The last regular bus left for Aveiro at 21:00… We are in the countryside. I went to the church in town where the hotel lady in Aveiro had kindly found out for me that it was supposed to have a taxi stand, nothing there. I went back to the festival site and asked some security people and organizers and they sent me back to the church. There was a cafe opposite the church and taxis were supposed to be next to it. Yes, finally I found a taxi, but without driver… I went into the cafe and some friendly people there gave the taxi driver a ring and five minutes later a guy appeared who spoke no English at all and another one told him I need to go to Aveiro and he can let me out at the station there, since the driver didn’t know where my hotel was. So, after help from a good ten people, I managed to get into that taxi and someone drove me to Aveiro station! All in all the experience was a very nice one though, since everyone was friendly and trying to help the lost foreigner

Thanks Aveiro and Vagos, that festival is very well worth going to. Up next are pure tourist visits to Porto and Lisbon.