A strong contingent of Jamaican artistes is being billed for this year’s staging of Rototom Sunsplash, the reggae music festival set for Benicàssim, a municipality and beach resort located in the province of Castelló, on the Costa del Azahar in Spain, from August 16 to 22.

Now in its 27th year, Rototom Sunsplash has become a fixture on the list of reggae festivals on the European continent during the summer months. The event continues to attract some of the top names in the music. This year’s line-up of reggae acts includes Burning Spear, Damian “Junior Gong” Marley, Sean Paul, Julian Marley, Sly Dunbar and the Revolutionaries which includes saxophonist Dean Fraser, guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith and bass player Lloyd Parks, The Skatalites, Horace Andy, Black Uhuru, The Abysinnians, Max Romeo and Hempress Sativa.

This year, the festival has adopted a ‘Change the World’ mantra given the challenges which the inhabitants face at this time.

“In the current convulsive international context that is marked by a global pandemic, which continues to have health, social and economic consequences, compounded by armed conflicts, with the invasion of Ukraine among the most recent ones; humanitarian dramas such as those suffered by the refugee population; and the climate crisis increasingly threatening the planet, it was necessary to go a step further; to go beyond ‘wanting’ and opt for the ‘imperative’ to place ourselves in the front row and promote this much-needed change of course,” the festival’s director Filippo Giunta said in a statement.

He noted that the full extent of the projects being undertaken by Rototom will be explained in the coming weeks, but shared that it will include human and environmental projects.

“All these questions, and the channels to answer them and to be able to ‘change the world’, will be articulated in the different cultural areas that sustain the activity in the Benicàssim concert venue, such as the Social Forum, which will soon announce this year’s programme; or the spaces for families such as Magicomundo, which is already finalising the announcement of its many new features for 2022. It will also be reflected in the festival’s own sustainability policy, one of the first in Spain to have the ‘plastic free’ seal by completely eliminating the use of plastic both on the site and in the camping area; or in its usual social commitment actions, which also this year continue to grow and diversify into new areas, such as food sovereignty,” he said.

“The theme ‘We must change the world’ shows that Rototom Sunsplash remains true to its philosophy, and that the thousands of people who make it possible are not satisfied with just observing, but need to act,”explained Giunta.