The Festa do Avante! Reaches Its Fiftieth Year at the Quinta da Atalaia, With Beethoven's Ninth and a Fight Over Labour Law

Volunteers are painting murals on the Quinta da Atalaia this week, in Amora, Seixal, ahead of the Festa do Avante! on 4, 5 and 6 September. The PCP's festival is marking fifty years, which makes it older than almost every music festival now running in Portugal, and unlike any of them it is built and taken down each year by volunteers.

"It is incredible to show that for fifty consecutive years, even with difficulties, we managed to build something like this," Maria Rôlo told Público on the grounds last week. "It is here, in all these hectares, the concrete proof that a better world is possible." Behind her, a JCP youth mural put the same idea more briefly: "What if life were like the Festa do Avante!?"

Fifty years of moving and rebuilding

The festival has not stayed still. It has changed site several times and absorbed the sort of setbacks that close events permanently, including an explosion and a torrential downpour, before settling on the Quinta da Atalaia in 1990. The estate is assembled each year by dozens of militants and sympathisers who put up the stages, the pavilions and the regional food stands, then take them down again.

That labour model is the reason the ticket works the way it does. Entry is sold as an Entrada Permanente covering all three days rather than as a per-night ticket, and the site functions as a small temporary town, with the party's regional organisations, the JCP, publishers and international delegations each running their own space.

A rentrée, not only a festival

Portugal's political parties open their year at summer gatherings, and the Festa do Avante! is the PCP's. The rentrée season began on 14 August at the PSD's Pontal, which is also marking its fiftieth year, and runs through to the Communists' three days at the Atalaia. The theme the party has chosen for this edition is opposition to the government's labour package, the pacote laboral, which returns to Parliament in the autumn alongside the 2027 budget.

The music programme is broad by design. Carolina Deslandes, Carlão, Ney Matogrosso, António Zambujo and the guitarist Pedro Jóia are on the bill, with trumpeter Laurent Filipe presenting a Miles Davis programme, the American group Erica Brown & The Bluegrass Connection, and Portuguese acts including King Bigs, Luta Livre and Ghoya. The traditional symphonic concert takes Beethoven's Ninth, performed by the Orquestra Sinfonietta de Lisboa with the Coro Sinfónico Lisboa Cantat.

What this means if you are thinking of going

• It is a three-day pass, not a night out. Budget for the Entrada Permanente rather than expecting to pay at the gate for a single concert.
• Getting there matters. The Fertagus line from Lisbon serves Foros de Amora and Fogueteiro, and Transtejo runs ferries into Seixal from Cais do Sodré. Both beat driving to the gate.
• The food is the other half of the event. Each PCP regional organisation runs a stand cooking its own area's dishes, which makes it one of the cheapest tours of Portuguese regional cooking available in a single weekend.
• Expect politics, openly. This is a party festival with speeches, book stalls and campaigning, not a neutral music event. That is the point of it.

Portugal's oldest music festival, Vilar de Mouros, closed its run in the Minho last weekend and has already announced it will return in 2027. The Avante! has managed fifty years on a different economy entirely: no headline fees at market rates, no sponsors on the main stage, and an unpaid workforce that turns up every August to build a town and then dismantle it.