Great Stage Park is a roughly 650-acre farm property about 65 miles southeast of Nashville in Manchester, Tennessee, best known as the permanent home of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Locals simply call it “The Farm,” a fitting nickname for a site that sits quiet and empty for most of the year before transforming into one of the largest temporary cities in Tennessee each June.
Founded in 2002 by Ashley Capps, Superfly, Coran Capshaw, and Chip Hooper, Bonnaroo turned this pastoral stretch of farmland into a genre-spanning music mecca, hosting everyone from jam bands to hip-hop headliners across multiple stages. Aside from a permanent amphitheater structure, fountain, and a handful of small buildings, nearly everything at Great Stage Park is built up and torn down for the festival, making the venue’s annual reinvention part of its identity.
Stats at a Glance
- Location: Manchester, Tennessee
- Type: Outdoor festival grounds
- Opened: 2002 (first Bonnaroo festival)
- Size: About 650 acres
- Capacity: Up to about 80,000-100,000 festivalgoers
- Famous for: Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival
The Festival Experience
For four days every June, Great Stage Park’s “Centeroo” area comes alive with the What Stage, Which Stage, That Tent, This Tent, and The Other Stage, hosting a lineup that spans indie rock, jazz, bluegrass, country, gospel, reggae, and electronic music. The What Stage alone has drawn crowds as large as 80,000, and campground areas like the “Where in the Woods Stage” have added late-night electronic sets since 2018.
Outside of festival week, Great Stage Park reverts to open farmland, with only a few permanent structures, including bathrooms and a barn, remaining on site. That contrast between quiet pastureland and packed festival grounds is central to Bonnaroo’s reputation as an immersive, campout music experience rather than a typical day-trip concert venue.
A Nashville-Area Music Landmark
Bonnaroo’s arrival in 2002 quickly made Great Stage Park a fixture of the American festival circuit, and Rolling Stone later named the festival’s launch among the moments that changed rock and roll. Attendance has fluctuated with the times, from a peak of around 100,000 in 2012 to smaller crowds in more recent years, but the site has remained Bonnaroo’s home for over two decades.
The park has also hosted other events, including the Exit 111 rock festival in October 2019, showing that its infrastructure can support large-scale music gatherings beyond Bonnaroo itself.
Explore more: Explore more Music Venues.
Great Stage Park FAQs
What is Great Stage Park known for?
Great Stage Park is best known as the permanent home of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, held every June since 2002 in Manchester, Tennessee.
How big is Great Stage Park?
The property covers roughly 650 acres of farmland southeast of Nashville, most of which is temporarily transformed with stages and campgrounds during festival week.
Is Great Stage Park open year-round?
No. Outside of Bonnaroo and occasional other events like the 2019 Exit 111 festival, the site functions as largely unused farmland, with only a few permanent structures on the grounds.
Get More from Great Stage Park
Log the coasters, stadiums, and venues you’ve experienced, rate Great Stage Park, and see what your friends thought. Get the ThrillZing app.
Photo: Stab At Sleep from F L O R I D A, United States / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.