Camp Bestival - Where To Camp

The map has now been released on the official site, which gives you a good idea of where everything will be set up this year and a chance to plan some of your time at the festival. In all honesty most of the attractions are fairly close together, once you have walked in from your tent.

Where to actually camp though always presents a bit of a dilemma. I am only talking about bringing your own tent here, although there are other options with yurts, teepee's and other solutions offered on site.

This gives you two options, either the main camp site or Camping Plus, which costs an additional amount, but is much closer to the festival attractions. Dealing with the main camp site first, it is obviously large and not entirely flat. In fact the first thing you will see from the car park is a hill in front of you. This is in fact relatively level on top and a popular place to set up camp, if you walk further across this it leads to a steep down hill slope, at the bottom of which you pass into the remainder of the camping area, for the sake of argument I will call this the 2nd area.

There are a number of factors that influence where to camp, if you are arriving late on Thursday it will be a matter of fitting in where ever you can find a gap as most areas will be pretty well populated by then. The primary choice to be made is how far you want to carry all of the camping gear against how far you want to walk into the festival each day. If you are happy to do the long walk with all of the gear, then the second area is my advice. Turning left into after coming down the steep hill leads you to a flat area which is close to the toilets and showers, top tip with the showers is to use them in the afternoon when there are small or no queues. There are also normally food and drink stalls here which is very handy after a long day. Camping in this area also leaves you with a much easier daily walk, making it easier to pop back for an afternoon siesta if required.

Camping in the first area, closer to the car park, means that you have a shorter distance to carry all your equipment, it does mean a longer walk in each day though. Also to get a good pitch, flat if possible, then you need to have arrived early, the car park opens before the gates and there was a queue of campers last year waiting to get in.

Alternatively as I mentioned you can pay for Camping Plus which gives you a guaranteed pitch and is much closer to the festival being located in the area behind the Freesports Park. Unfortunately I think this is all booked for next week, but worth remembering for next year, because you will be back.

Andy