For ten weeks a year a disused gasworks on the Minkelersstraat opens its yard to anyone who walks in, every afternoon except Monday. The Zomerfabriek, the Summer Factory, is the open-air base of Zomer van Antwerpen, the city’s summer arts festival, and it is free. In 2025 it opened from 19 June to 31 August, from 17:00 to 01:00 on weekdays and from 15:00 at weekends, closed on Mondays. In 2026 it was back for the festival’s 32nd edition, which ran from 18 June to 30 August.

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The address is Minkelersstraat 2, in the 2018 postcode. VRT NWS places the site in Berchem; a Dutch travel guide in 2013 put the same old gas factory in Zurenborg. Either way it is well outside the old centre.

A gasworks with a skate zone

The Zomerfabriek was already in the gasworks in 2013. When the Dutch guide wrote about it in July 2013, it opened every day from 15:00 to 03:00, with DJs, spoken word, outdoor films, gaming and urban sports, a terrace with homemade cocktails and a kitchen serving seasonal dishes at modest prices. When VRT NWS marked the festival’s 25th anniversary in 2019, it described the Zomerfabriek as a vacant gas factory turned into a place mainly for young people and fans of urban music and culture. That is still a fair description.

The 2025 programme gave the week a rhythm. Classic Tuesdays, Grab the Mic, Dance & Jam and Sunday Jams came back every week. There was a skate zone, a basketball court and a calisthenics area, with sports tournaments run with Sporting A. Live concerts, exhibitions, spoken word, workshops, street food and a bar filled the rest. The 2025 brochure names Merel Moors as the Zomerfabriek’s coordinator.

Much of the calendar is not made by the festival at all. Through an open call, outside groups book the site for their own nights, and the 2025 list shows the range: the HAUSCAT Festival, a Textile Harmony workshop, an exhibition called Kunst voor Kunst, the Barrio Latino Festival, a hip-hop battle called Return of the Breakers, a Soweto Amapiano festival, a Queer Market, Queer Cuban Salsa and a run of club nights.

Theatre in a yard

Some years the Zomerfabriek also hosts the festival’s bigger productions. In 2025 the Forman Brothers Theatre, the company run by the sons of the film director Miloš Forman, built its own theatre on the site and played The Conference of the Birds there from 29 July to 9 August: 75 minutes, at €20, a rare ticketed show in a free yard. Patrick De Groote, the festival’s artistic director and programmer, said that year that the Zomerfabriek and Muziek in de Wijk, the free concerts on neighbourhood squares, draw different audiences but share a recognisable thread.

In 2026 the site was the test bed for a new idea. Zomer van Antwerpen labelled every performance as low-stimulus or high-stimulus, and at the Zomerfabriek it put low-stimulus zones, small huts on the edge of the site away from the crowds, for neurodivergent visitors. “We made an assessment of the stimuli for every performance,” De Groote told VRT NWS in May 2026. “There really is a need for it.” The festival already ran projects for blind and deaf visitors and works on wheelchair access; this was its first pilot for neurodivergent audiences.

The walls around it

The streets around the gasworks are a gallery in their own right. Each summer the international graffiti festival Meeting of Styles takes place around the Zomerfabriek, in the Minkelersstraat, the Vlijtstraat and the Uitbreidingstraat; the city’s street art guide to Berchem says artists from all over the world come to repaint about 3,000 square metres of wall. In 2025 the festival ran from 20 to 22 June around the Krugerstraat and the Minkelersstraat. What it leaves behind stays up as an outdoor collection, free to see all year, so the walls are worth a look even when the yard is closed.

The model has a famous cousin in Amsterdam. The Westergas there was built as a gasworks in 1885 and closed in 1967; in the 1990s the Holland Festival and Awakenings rediscovered its gas holder, which now holds more than 3,500 people as a concert hall in a cultural park. Antwerp has done something more modest and, for the summer at least, more open: no tickets at the gate, no headliner, and a basketball court.

That is why the Zomerfabriek is the part of Zomer van Antwerpen to start with. Most of the festival is a programme: you pick a show, book a seat, turn up at eight. The Zomerfabriek is a place. You can walk in on a Wednesday at six without a plan and find a jam session, a skate contest or nothing much, and none of it costs anything until you get to the bar.

What the earlier version got wrong

An earlier draft of this page dated the Zomerfabriek to 2000, put it in a lush green compound and filled it with a line-up: two named Belgian acts, a virtual-reality version of a Méliès silent film, a mechanical whale that swallowed visitors, a contemporary dance premiere and a green festival award. None of these could be found in the Zomerfabriek’s programmes, so they are not here. Cinema Urbana, the open-air film strand it mentioned, is real, but it screens on the Kattendijkdok-Oostkaai, not at the gasworks.

Zomer van Antwerpen itself began in 1995, after the city’s year as European Capital of Culture in 1993, and its first edition drew 47,600 visitors. It now counts about 300,000 a year, and its other venues in 2025 ran from the old first-class waiting room of Antwerp Central Station, the railway cathedral to the fort at Lillo. The programme, the hours and the open-call nights for each new summer appear on Zomer van Antwerpen’s own site, with the full Zomerfabriek programme from late May.

Amsterdam’s gasworks stood empty for decades before it became a cultural park. Antwerp’s becomes one every June, and gives the yard back in September.