What started as a guerrillero local rock night has bloomed into one of Spain’s most electric boutique festivals.
RockLand Fest 2025, officially billed as RockLand Art Fest, took over the cobbled streets and weathered plazas of Santo Domingo de la Calzada last weekend (July 18-20), delighting thousands of music lovers with a diverse and energetic international lineup that included the newly reassembled Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Wolfmother, Jet, and The Black Keys, among others.
If you haven’t heard of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, it’s probably because you’re not a deeply religious Catholic living in Europe. The small town that literally means “Saint Dominic of the Causeway,” has just 6,000 residents and isn’t really close to any major cities, sitting about 80 miles from Bilbao, 185 miles from Madrid, and 320 miles from Barcelona.
So why would it be important enough to host a rock fest with such big names?
Part of the answer is clucking at you from the concert poster above.
But to truly understand the importance of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, we’ve got to go all the way back to around 10 B.C.—the year punk broke. There’s a deeply religious tale associated with this particular site, forever known as The Miracle of the Hen, which makes Santo Domingo de la Calzada now the perfect place for bands that have been declared dead to rise up, crow like cocks, and laugh at the authority that once wrote them off.
read more at: Setlist.fm
