Where Sleeping Giants Began

Before the line-up and before the festival itself, there was the land, a family project, and a feeling that something meaningful wanted to grow there.

Sleeping Giants began long before anyone thought about building a festival.

It began fifteen years ago, when Stephen and his son Jordan first arrived at a piece of land in the hills of Andalucía that immediately felt different.

“The land seemed to hum,” Stephen says. “It felt ancient and alive all at the same time.”

Surrounded by mountains, olive groves, oak trees and open sky, there was something about the place that stayed with them. Something difficult to explain, but impossible to ignore. That feeling gradually became the centre of something much bigger.

Even now, both Jordan and Stephen speak about the land less like something they own, and more like something they’ve been in relationship with for years. For Jordan, it always circles back to the full moon, and the way it hangs over the mountains, a constant presence whenever he returns to the land. There’s something truly special about the energy here, and it needs to be shared with people.

For years there was no clear plan for what the land would become. There were ideas about retreats, gatherings, and community living. Different versions of the future appeared and disappeared over the years as the family kept returning to Finca La Lola and deepening their relationship with the land around it.

And in many ways, Andalucía itself became part of the story too.

Both Jordan and Stephen speak about the region with the kind of affection people usually reserve for places that have shaped them deeply over time. The warmth of the people. The slower rhythm of life. Ancient cities, open landscapes, small farming communities and long afternoons that seem to stretch on forever.

“Nothing happens quickly in Andalucía,” Stephen says. “And people like it that way.”

Jordan laughs that despite the obvious differences, Andalucía reminds him a lot of Lincolnshire, where he was born and raised. Farming communities. Open-hearted people. Places where everybody knows everybody. “Just a bit hotter here.”

Before the idea of Sleeping Giants emerged, festivals were already a huge part of family life. Jordan grew up attending festivals across the UK with his family, from large scale music festivals to smaller more holistic gatherings. In the years that followed, what stayed with both him and Stephen were not just the performances themselves, but the moments in between.

The conversations with strangers. The unexpected openness people stepped into. The temporary communities that formed when people felt relaxed enough to let their guard down and simply be themselves.

At Glastonbury, they noticed themselves spending more and more time in the healing fields, wondering why that kind of space wasn’t more central.

Stephen describes it as something that slowly shifted over time, the festivals became less about the music, and more about the sense of serendipity, the people you meet, and the feeling of connection that runs through it all. Like a land at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, where the real experience is everything happening between the obvious moments.

For Jordan, the focus shifted elsewhere. He became less interested in the performances themselves and more drawn to the unseen architecture of experience. How festivals are built. How spaces are shaped. How design quietly holds people in a sense of safety and ease. He began noticing how colour, layout, and structure influence how people move through a space, and how those details can encourage people to slow down, stay longer, connect more deeply, and open up.

“How do you encourage people to drop their preconceptions and embrace each other?” he reflects.

Without fully realising it at the time, they were already gathering the pieces of what would become Sleeping Giants.

At first, the vision for Finca La Lola centred more around creating a retreat space and a self-sustaining community than a festival itself. Jordan describes always wanting to create somewhere that carried the feeling of “living at a festival all year long.” Somewhere people could gather meaningfully, reconnect with themselves, and experience a different rhythm of living.

The festival came later, and according to both of them, very naturally.

Partly through years of hosting gatherings and small events. Partly through conversations. And partly through a growing feeling that spaces centred around movement, healing, nature and human connection were becoming more needed than ever.

In many ways the project is a continuation of the relationship between father and son. Jordan and Stephen have worked together for more than fifteen years, long before Sleeping Giants existed. Stephen describes Jordan as someone who naturally brings people together and creates community wherever he goes. Jordan describes his dad as someone full of expansive ideas and momentum. Between them, things move forward.

“We argue like any father and son,” Jordan says, “but we know we can always trust where our hearts are.” 

Today, Sleeping Giants is becoming the next chapter of that journey. A four-day Autumn Equinox gathering beneath the hills of Andalucía, bringing together movement, music, ceremony, healing arts and community.

But at its heart, the project remains simple. When asked what they hope people feel when they arrive, both answers circle around the same things:

Warmth. Openness. A sense of possibility.

A feeling of being able to fully arrive as yourself.

And maybe, for a few days at least, a feeling of belonging.