Millions of people around the world know Tomorrowland as a fairy-tale world of fireworks, DJs, and jaw-dropping stages. But beneath the raves lies a very different story.
To uncover that story, we need to travel back in time. The first edition of the festival took place in August 2005, at the recreational domain De Schorre, a former clay pit that had been shut down over the course of the twentieth century.
Traces of excavation
The abandoned clay pits were taken over by the Province of Antwerp in 1986. Drying sheds, kilns, chimneys and warehouses all disappeared from the scene. The derelict site was then transformed into a recreational and nature area, with a few traces of its industrial past deliberately preserved.
Today, when you stand in front of Tomorrowland's main stage, you're not just looking at the décor and the light shows. The undulating landscape itself tells a story: those hills and hollows are the fingerprints of decades of clay extraction.
Rave Cave
Dive into the Rave Cave during Tomorrowland, and you're stepping straight into a piece of industrial history. The festival's smallest stage sits inside a former brick-kiln tunnel, a passageway once used by horse-drawn carts or narrow-gauge trains to haul clay and bricks away from the site.
The Trollenbos ("Troll Forest"), right next to the festival grounds, is also teeming with industrial remnants, including a concrete overpass that no longer leads anywhere.
Trolls
That overpass was once used to transport excavated clay by wagon to a processing facility belonging to the Anvereeth brickworks. Since 2019, Hannes — one of the seven giant trolls created by Danish artist Thomas Dambo — has stood guard over these ruins.
At the edge of a scraped-out clay pit deeper in the Trollenbos, you'll find a crumbling clay dredger slowly falling apart. Troll Mikil keeps a watchful eye on this machine.
Terhagen
Even beyond the festival grounds, the link to the industrial past remains visible. To the east of De Schorre stretches a vast clay extraction area that has swallowed up more than half the land of the hamlet of Terhagen. Here you'll find the twisted carcass of a clay dredger and a tilting machine half-submerged in one of the flooded pits.
Clay pits began claiming more than half of Terhagen's territory from the late nineteenth century onward. After the extraction ended, nature slowly began to reclaim its space.
Camping DreamVille
The traces of industrial heritage are just as unmistakable around the DreamVille campsite, which stretches between Nachtegaalstraat and Rumstsestraat. That second entrance sits right next to the now-disused water tower of Rumst.
A viewing tower stands alongside this 35-metre-high water tower from 1943, offering a panoramic view over a still-active clay extraction area that borders the campsite.
Visiting Tomorrowland means stepping not just into a festival world, but into a landscape where the history of the Rupel region is still very much present and visible.
More remnants
Elsewhere in Boom and along the Rupel, you'll also come across old brickworks, drying sheds and brick-kiln tunnels — for instance at 't Geleeg (photo below) or Brik Boom.
