Arvika Festival (Swedish: Arvikafestivalen) was an annual music festival held in Arvika, Sweden. It took place during three days in the middle of July, from Thursday to Saturday, with camping available from the beginning of the week. The non-profit association "Galaxen" (Swedish for "The Galaxy") arranged the festival.
Since the nineties, the festival had built up a tradition of booking many big synth-pop bands. This was initially an unintended side effect: for the first festival in 1992 the arrangers had booked Cat Rapes Dog, Pouppée Fabrikk and S.P.O.C.K. and about 50% of the audience that showed up was actually mostly interested in these bands since no other festival booked many synth acts. However, along with the synth bands, internationally and nationally famous rock and pop acts visit the festival every year, attracting people not only interested in synth pop.
In 2006, somewhere between 15000 and 16000 people visited the festival, breaking a new record in ticket sales, and confirming the festival's spot as one of the big ones in Sweden. In 2009 the total number of tickets sold were 22500 including all three-day and one-day passes.
Arvika is a locality and the seat of Arvika Municipality, Värmland County, Sweden with 14,244 inhabitants in 2010.
Geography
The town of Arvika is situated at Kyrkviken, a bay of Glafsfjorden, Sweden's only inland fjord, a remnant of the time following the last ice age (once a fjord of the Ancylus Lake).
The area is hilly with the tallest hill Storkasberget close to the town centre.
Arvika and its surroundings have excellent water infrastructure. In fact, Arvika has the innermost harbour in the whole of Sweden. Through a system of canals, lake Vänern can be reached, and from there the Göta Canal allows further passage to Gothenburg and Sweden's west coast.
History
Ten kilometers west of the city, in Bergs Klätt, there are remnants of a younger Stone Age and Nordic Bronze Age settlements in the form of graves.
The town was a village until 1811 when it was given town privileges by royal charter under the name Oscarsstad in order to improve the economy of the area. This attempt was unsuccessful, and the town privileges were repealed in 1821 and the town was instead given the status of köping (township) and renamed Arvika. The town privileges were reinstated at the founding centennial in 1911, and the name Arvika remained. The city status is now obsolete, but Arvika is since 1971 the seat of the larger Arvika municipality.