After being close to the North Sea, my festival schedule took me to another sandy beach located on one of the few lakes located around Berlin. The Helene Beach Festival is a musical event located around one hour away from the big city, and is able to lock half of its visitors (around 25 000 a year) out of the big city and bring them some vacation feeling close to their home town.

When you sit along the beach on the Helenensee or hold your feet into the clear lake water, you won’t feel in Germany any longer. It might be a bit fresher than on a beach in Spain, but this little barefoot festival has its own charm. Helenensee was one of the only bathing places during the DDR times where the locals from Eastern Berlin could find some refreshment during summer. In fact, the 4 km beach was visited by 30 000 people a week!

Born as an electronic open air venue 5 years ago, the festival organisation added some more diversity to the line up by adding an urban stage close to the water, so that there’s music for every kind of taste.

The second stage on the sand, the Laguna Beach, was one of my favourites of this weekend. I loved Juli Holz’s live performance and Björn Störig never disappoints. Other DJs from SupDub and Stil vor Talent played the finest electronic tunes until 7AM in the morning, the sound quality was amazing for being completely outdoor and the site around the stage was absolutely nice decorated.

The festival usually kicks off around 7 or 8 in the evening, so there’s no rush during the day: campers can sleep until late in the shade of the woods or earlybirds could do some water activities provided on this private lake area.

The main stage alternated rock acts like Bonaparte or Guano Apes to local urban acts like Sido; the visitors used to come in quite late, so the whole main site was crowded until the entrance gates after the sun went down. I was lucky enough to meet the guys at the Jägermeister Gasthaus again, so I enjoyed most of the main acts from above with the best views. The guys spoiled us with the best mixed Jäger drinks and we enjoyed a dance with them to perfectly end our first evening. 🙂

I was pretty lucky to enjoy a whole backstage tour on my second day here, where some facts and figures where told us and we had an insight to a festival organisation that sometimes can turn into madness. A storm came up later that night, so a lot of places were forced to close earlier. The Jägermeister Brass band was able to heat up the crowd in between the main acts by playing some mash up songs, and they did really, really well.

This festival visit went great. The coolest thing was the diversitiy of every stage and the possibility to dance or have a chill in a couple of steps on the same place. The only minus point was the whole food court being outside of the site. I’m usually one of the persons that loves to eat her festival dishes by listening to some live music, and I was gutted that this wasn’t the case this time. The positive aspect of it is surely that there’s almost no waste on the festival and everything is almost kept clean 🙂

Practical Infos

About the Festival: Helene Beach Festival is located in Frankfurt (Oder). Since the site is quite small tickets sell out pretty fast. You’ll find more infos here.

Where to Stay: The camp site is huge and between the trees, so you won’t wake up in a total sauna since you got loads of shade. The camping opens on monday already so you can enjoy the beach and do some pre-relaxing vacation before the festival starts on the weekend.

In case you’re more the Hotel type, I can totally reccommend the Palais am Kleistpark, located in town. The rooms are great and you’ll feel like in a mini Versailles. Double rooms start from 75 EUR per night during the festival weekend.

Thank you Jägermeister for the invitation and the lovely Treatment.