Each April, tens of thousands of people flock to the heart of the Coachella Valley to camp, dance and let loose at the music festival by that same name.
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival features hundreds of performers on some half a dozen stages, spread out across two consecutive three-day weekends. This year, performances by the likes of Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, Post Malone, Benson Boone and even an appearance by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., instantly went viral.
Coachella's diverse lineup, celebrity-studded audience, and ample commercial opportunities for brands and social media influencers make it one of the most popular and profitable music festivals in the world. The event — combined with the country music festival Stagecoach, which is always the following weekend — sold about 250,000 tickets in 2024.
The catch?
Coachella the festival does not actually take place in Coachella the city. Since its founding in 1999, it's been held in nearby Indio. Both are part of the Coachella Valley, which is located in Southern California's Colorado Desert and is also home to cities like Palm Springs and Indian Wells.
"I think a lot of people who come to this area from other places aren't really sure what's what, and I don't think they really care," says Jeff Crider, a freelance writer and historian who has written a book about the Coachella Valley. "I think they just come and want to have a good time."
But it's worth learning about Coachella, both the place and the festival. The Coachella Valley's two primary industries, agriculture and entertainment, have rich histories that intertwine in fascinating ways.
The Coachella Valley is synonymous with wealth and celebrity, given its long list of famous visitors and winter residents, including many former U.S. presidents and Hollywood stars. But the region — which is also known for its agricultural production, particularly dates — is also home to a large population of farmworkers, many of whom are immigrants
"Yes, the rich and famous have winter homes here. Yes, we have some of the most famous entertainment events in the world taking place here," Crider says. "But the majority of the people who live and work out here year round are not rich and famous. Many, many, many of them are struggling to make it."
Where did the word come from?
Coachella itself was a product of the country's railroad system — and a typo.
As the City of Coachella's website explains, the Southern Pacific Railroad laid the first tracks throughout the valley in 1876, linking it to a growing network of railways across California. A secondary track, called a side spur, was built in present-day Coachella.
"It was literally just like an offramp from the railroad," Crider explains.
A railroad employee named Jason Rector was tasked with clearing the trees in that area, which became known as Woodspur. Rector is credited with becoming the town's first permanent resident and "unofficial mayor" for the rest of his life. He also helped name it.
According to the city's website, during the process of laying out the townsite in 1901, Rector proposed "Conchilla," which means "little shell" in Spanish and references the fossils that were found in the area.
The developers, in agreement, designed a prospectus that would announce the opening of the new town. But the product they got back from the printer misspelled "Conchilla" as "Coachella." Rather than delay the announcement, the founders decided to roll with the name — which the valley itself went on to adopt. The town, however, didn't become a city until 1946.
"'Coachella' was a mistake," Crider says. "They decided just to keep the name, even though 'Coachella' itself does not mean anything. It doesn't mean anything in Spanish, it doesn't mean anything in English, other than the place that we know as Coachella."
In the decades that followed, the region's dry, sunny climate and fertile soil began to attract both farmers and celebrities.
Early growers realized their crops could be ready to harvest long before other regions, and started planting dates and other types of produce to sell without competition. It has an important place in the labor movement too: The first significant farm labor strike — against table grape growers — took place in the Coachella Valley in 1965, led in part by Cesar Chavez.
At the same time, grand hotels like Palm Springs' El Mirador began drawing high-profile visitors from Los Angeles, about 100 miles away. The 1960's further boosted tourism, Crider says, thanks to the interstate and air conditioning.
In other words, Coachella Valley was a prominent venue for golf, tennis and other forms of entertainment long before the music festival came on the scene. Crider says it's been "an escape for the elite literally for a century" — and the Coachella festival has only made the area more famous since then.
"Because just like in the 1920's and '30s, when you had the photos of the Hollywood stars lounging by the swimming pool that made this place famous 100 years ago, today what makes this place famous is having pictures of the latest celebrities, Lady Gaga, for example, and others who are at Coachella right now," Crider adds. "They're making this place famous, but they're making the whole valley famous."
How has the word been used over time?
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival made its debut in early October 1999, with headliners including Beck and Rage Against the Machine and tickets costing $50 per day.
It was the brainchild of concert promoters Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett, organized by Tollett's company Goldenvoice — which made its name in the 1980s booking punk rock acts that other promoters wouldn't.
Tollett also helped the band Pearl Jam book alternate venues during its boycott of Ticketmaster after a dispute in the early 1990s. One of their gigs ended up at the Empire Polo Club — and showed Tollett how prime the venue could be for the large-scale festival of his dreams.
Coachella's organizers hoped to emulate the multi-act, days-long music festivals that were so popular overseas, such as those in Reading and Glastonbury in the United Kingdom.
"For Southern California, this could be the start of something really special," Tollett told the Los Angeles Times in 1999.
But that first year wasn't a huge success, in part because of the intentional lack of corporate sponsors, blazing triple-digit temperatures and a drop in advance ticket sales after Woodstock '99 descended into violence. Tollett revealed much later that the festival's first year cost the company $750,000.
Coachella took a break in 2000 and returned in 2001, this time scaled back to a single day and scheduled for the milder weather of April. Its lineups, ticket prices and crowd sizes kept growing.
"The desert town of Indio has become the unlikely location of one of the hottest music festivals in the country," NPR's Stacey Bond reported in 2004.
That was the year tickets sold out for the first time, drawing a crowd of 120,000 to see acts including Radiohead and The Cure, as well the reunited Pixies (the first of many reunions on the Coachella stage).
Coachella has expanded and evolved over the years: It eliminated single-day tickets in favor of three-day passes in 2010, added a second weekend starting in 2012 and increasingly broke attendance records until the city increased its cap to 125,000 in 2017.
These days, general admission passes start around $600, not including extra fees for camping and parking. The festival that originally resisted sponsorship deals now boasts dozens of corporate partners, including food, beverage and cosmetic companies.
And while it still showcases dozens of the moment's biggest artists (144 acts this year), it's about much more than just music, especially in the era of social media and influencers.
"The word 'Coachella' itself has become shorthand for a tastemaker event," the Los Angeles Times declared in 2019, the festival's 20th anniversary.
Why does the word matter today?
Crider says the local economy is dependent on events like Coachella to draw people in, calling the influx of festival goers "a huge shot in the arm for our economy."
"As someone who has lived in this valley for half of my lifetime, I love seeing the kids come in, come into our stores, buying alcohol, sunscreen, whatever else they need, souvenirs," Crider says. "And then they line up at grocery stores and they go on buses that take them down to … the polo grounds, where they're going to see all the music performed. And it's just a great time."
That said, the reality of life in the region — and the huge discrepancies in wealth — are not necessarily apparent to people who associate Coachella simply with the festival that bears its name.
He says festival goers who complain about the Coachella heat likely don't realize that there are farmworkers harvesting produce in that same sun just miles away, or that many of the people putting the food on their restaurant tables rely on food banks themselves.
"That is something that people might not realize when they're out here spending a gazillion dollars to attend a music festival and being overcharged for drinks and whatnot, as we know that happens," Crider says. "You wouldn't think that there would be so much poverty out here at the same time."
Crider says a lot of young people leave the area for college and don't return because of a lack of jobs, which is something business interests in the valley are trying to change.
"There have been efforts to try to diversify the economy … so that we don't remain forever dependent on just agriculture or tourism," he adds. "But that's how this area was really created — and it works."
Copyright 2025 NPR