Ten festival trips worth building a holiday around

The best festivals are terrible weekend breaks and magnificent holidays. Fly in, see the headliners, fly out — and you miss the point entirely: the slow build of the campsite, the city on the doorstep, the fourth day when your feet hurt and the best set of the year happens anyway. The ten below justify the full production — annual leave, proper planning, a recovery day at the end. Tickets for most go on sale the preceding autumn and the good accommodation goes first, so treat booking as part of the fun.

A week-long 'Island of Freedom' on a Danube island in the middle of a capital city — which means thermal baths, ruin bars and proper beds are twenty minutes from the main stage. Line-ups sprawl from stadium pop to world music and circus tents. The clever play is a three-day pass plus city days either side; soak the damage away at Széchenyi baths. August heat is real, so camp in the shade.

Exit occupies an eighteenth-century fortress above the Danube, and no festival on earth has a better venue: stages tucked into moats, tunnels and ramparts, with the Dance Arena running until well past sunrise — the 6am fortress views are the festival's true headliner. It began as a student protest in 2000 and keeps a political soul. Stay in Novi Sad's old town rather than camping, and budget a day for Belgrade.

The connoisseur's line-up — indie royalty, techno, and next year's obsessions on one seafront site — with a civilised twist: no camping. You sleep in a real Barcelona bed, spend days on the beach or in the Gothic Quarter, then head to the Parc del Fòrum around 6pm because nothing important starts before then. Sets run until dawn. Book accommodation the day tickets land; early June rooms vanish embarrassingly fast.

Less a festival than a temporary city of 200,000 with its own healing fields, secret sets and micro-nations. The Pyramid Stage is only the front door — the real initiation is the south-east corner after midnight, a hallucinatory sprawl of installations and sound systems. Tickets require pre-registration and a legendary October scramble, so recruit a syndicate. Pack wellies whatever the forecast, and give yourself a full day to find the good stuff.

Scandinavia's biggest festival is run as a non-profit — every krone of surplus goes to charity — and the goodwill shows in the crowd. The iconic Orange Stage takes the headliners, but Roskilde's secret is the warm-up: the campsite opens four days before the music proper, becoming a self-governing city of communal dinners and sound systems. Danes book with their entire friendship group; volunteering a few shifts earns a free ticket.

Two weeks each July on the shore of Lake Geneva, with the Alps as a backdrop and a guest list that has run from Miles Davis to Prince. Headline tickets in the Auditorium Stravinski cost serious francs, but the shrewd move is the free programme — lakeside stages and late-night jams that deliver half the magic for nothing. Stay in Lausanne or Vevey and train in; Montreux hotel prices reach for the peaks.

The world's largest arts festival swallows Edinburgh whole every August: 3,000-odd shows in basements, big tops and converted lecture theatres, running from breakfast until 5am. Build days around two or three bookings and leave gaps for punts on unknowns — the Free Fringe's pay-what-you-like shows produce the best stories. Beds are the battle; book by March or commute from Glasgow. Late-night comedy at the Monkey Barrel beats anything on television.

Carnival is less an event than a week-long suspension of the laws of physics, and the Sambadrome's feathered mega-parades are only the televised summit. The real festival is the blocos: hundreds of free street parties, each with its own brass band, costume code and neighbourhood, rolling from 7am crawls to midnight mayhem. Book flights and rooms six months out, base yourself near Ipanema or Santa Teresa, and download a bloco timetable app — improvising is for amateurs.

Coachella's genius is geography: the festival sits in a palm-fringed desert valley twenty minutes from Palm Springs, so the holiday builds itself — mid-century architecture, taco crawls and pool time by day, headliners under floodlit mountains by night. It's as much fashion week as gig, which is half the anthropology. Go for the second April weekend, when tickets and villa rentals run cheaper, and pay for the shuttle pass; festival car parks at 1am break spirits.

Purists insist Burning Man isn't a festival, and annoyingly they're right: it's a temporary city of 70,000 in the Nevada desert with no line-up, no headliners and nothing for sale except ice and coffee. You bring everything, gift freely, and dance at sunrise beside art cars the size of galleons. Fly into Reno, join an established camp rather than winging it solo, and pack triple the water you think you need. The dust stays with you forever.