Thousands of music fans converged on the Franco-Italian border on Thursday for Teknival 2002, billed as the summer’s largest rave, which is being held in Italy to skirt a French crackdown.
French officials said as many as 4 000 ravers were already at the site on the Italian side of the Col de Larche pass in the Alps, but organisers had not yet arrived and partygoers were impatiently waiting for the event to kick off.
”Where’s the sound? Where’s the sound?” a group of ravers chanted as they waited for a booming loudspeaker system that had yet to arrive.
The Teknival is the first large rave organised since France passed tough legislation on May 7 that obliges organisers to gain approval for the event site a month in advance or risk having their equipment seized by police.
Rave organisers, who alerted partygoers to the location by Internet, chose to set up camp in Italy, just 200 meters from the French border, to sidestep the new French regulations.
Italy also requires rave organisers to register their events and reserves the right to ban them if they pose a security risk, an interior ministry representative said, but she admitted that unregistered parties do take place.
The most eager ravers arrived shortly after midnight at Barcelonnette, just west of the Col de Larche, and found their path blocked as the road leading into the pass was closed overnight for construction work.
But the most intrepid managed to shift several concrete barricades so cars and other vehicles could pass.
The arrival of hundreds of cars from all over France to the
site, located about 70 kilometres east of Gap, later forced authorities to shut down a motorway across the border into Italy.
Route 900, often used by tourists heading for summer holiday retreats in the Alps, is not large enough to handle such traffic, officials said, adding the situation posed a public security ”problem.”
One regional official told AFP that cars parked on both sides of the road were a safety hazard, as emergency services would be unable to reach the site if needed.
As they waited for the party to get started, some ravers slept in their cars while others combed the area looking for a space big enough to welcome the thousands expected.
By midday, several hundred dance mavens had set up camp in a grassy mountainside clearing, pitching tents a few hundred meters from a former border checkpoint and a cafe, which quickly filled to capacity.
The medical aid charity Medecins du Monde set up a first-aid stand mainly staffed by drug-testing experts, trained to detect overdoses of ecstasy, the drug of choice for ravers.
Last year’s Teknival, held in the southern French town of Florac, attracted 15 000 partygoers. – Sapa-AFP