Dua Lipa Is Opening Europe’s Youngest Country to the World
The Sunny Hill Festival is bringing global stars and visitors to Pristina, while giving Kosovar musicians a path to international audiences.
By Gresa Kraja
When Arbër Salihu was recording and performing with the Pristina duo Oborri, an invitation to play abroad did not always mean he could go. The Kosovar band missed gigs because organizers would not cover visa costs, while the time and expense involved made travelling difficult to justify. These restrictions shaped what local musicians believed was possible.
“Artists in Kosovo became conditioned to focus almost exclusively on Albanian-speaking audiences,” said 35-year-old Salihu, and they saw an international career “as something largely out of reach.”
That finally started to change in 2018, when pop star Dua Lipa and her father Dukagjin Lipa set up the Sunny Hill festival in Pristina and began drawing international performers and visitors to Kosovo’s capital city. This year, the three-day festival drew a record 120,000 people, including visitors from more than 60 countries. Salihu performed his blend of hip-hop, rock & roll and folk music for the third time under his stage name, La Fazani, to a packed audience.
Dukagjin Lipa wants to double nightly attendance at Sunny Hill to around 75,000 in the next five years. Reaching that “sweet spot” would require more land, infrastructure and financing, he said in an interview. Government support could shorten the timeline, but he said no such talks are underway. He ruled out any investment that would prioritize financial return over artistic freedom.
“Somebody is going to be so inspired by these moments in their life that they’re going to pursue music in a serious way,” he said. “What we are providing is a dream.” Lipa’s ambition resonates in the country of 1.6 million people, which has Europe’s youngest population. The average age is just under 35, while almost one-quarter are younger than 15. Yet many young Kosovars grew up unable to travel freely and rarely saw the foreign musicians they followed online perform at home.
Sunny Hill pushed against the isolation. The Lipas used the festival to lobby for access to the Schengen area under the slogan “Set Me Free,” and became the campaign’s most high-profile advocates. In 2024, Kosovars gained visa-free access to 29 European countries.
During the festival, the scale of what the family created is visible throughout Pristina. Sunny Hill banners hang above the streets, young people wearing wristbands fill café terraces and hotel rooms fill up. After dark, crowds move to the festival park in Bërnica, on the outskirts of the city, to see stars such as Katy Perry, Lewis Capaldi and Martin Garrix perform alongside Albanian and emerging Kosovar artists. The land, once used to dump motorway rubble, now has a grid-connected electricity supply, emergency access routes and designated production and service areas, as well as more than 1,500 newly planted trees.
Three-day passes for this year’s event, which took place from July 31 to Aug. 2, started at €110 ($128) for the earliest buyers, rising to €165 for the next discounted batch and €195 at the regular rate, compared to an average gross monthly wage of €713 last year. The pass covered about 50 acts across four stages.
Research commissioned by the festival estimated €22 million in direct economic impact from the 2025 event. Lipa expects this year’s figure to exceed €50 million, though he said the study is not complete. While modest relative to the country’s $12.46 billion economy, the weekend is a significant boost to spending on hotels, restaurants and transport providers.
Among visitors are members of a massive diaspora — roughly a third of Kosovars live abroad, mainly in Germany, Switzerland and the US — who plan trips around the performances. “It is becoming a tradition for me and my cousins to come together,” said 22-year-old Artan Berisha, who was born in Basel after his parents left Kosovo for economic reasons. “It is amazing to witness this event.”
Dua Lipa returned to Pristina for her first concert in Kosovo in 2016, five years after leaving the city aged 15 to pursue music in London. The crowd came to see a rising pop star, but for her family, the night felt like the country was welcoming them home.
Two years later, the Lipas channeled that feeling into setting up Sunny Hill, English for Kodra e Diellit, their former Pristina neighborhood. The festival supports the Sunny Hill Foundation — the nonprofit Dua and her father earlier established to support Kosovar arts, culture and education — by giving the organization a way to raise funds and build international partnerships.
Since Kosovo sits outside the usual European music touring routes, Dua Lipa relied on personal relationships to get it started. Garrix who collaborated with her in 2017, was among the first to take what he called a “leap of faith.” Managers now know of Sunny Hill, and some approach the organizers themselves.
Dua Lipa has kept returning even as her career grew, headlining the festival in 2025. She was not on this year’s lineup, but came back for opening night. Kosovo treats her success as something close to a national achievement. She became an honorary ambassador in 2022 and was granted citizenship in 2025 through a presidential decree. A year earlier, Dua, which means “I love” in Albanian, was the most popular name registered for newborn girls in Kosovo.
For Salihu, the country’s music industry still has a way to go. It lacks the wider infrastructure artists need to build a sustainable career, including robust copyright protection and royalty collection, labels and legal support. “Too many basic mechanisms are still missing,” he says.
But the festival provides “a huge boost” by raising standards and bringing artists and industry insiders together, Salihu said. Along with visa-free travel, it has helped him reach international audiences, including at Tallinn Music Week, where he won an award that brought him back to Estonia to record new music.
Crucially, Salihu added, Sunny Hill is changing the image of Kosovo, long associated only with war and political conflict, and still not recognized by Serbia and five EU states nearly two decades after it declared independence, becoming Europe’s youngest country.
“They can see that we’re a people with an inherent need for expression, with joy in our hearts,” he said of festival visitors, “and that we’re supremely talented, with just the right amount of spice.”