Basel has been chosen as the venue for Eurovision 2025

In 2025, the 69th international Eurovision Song Contest will be held in the Swiss city of Basel. The event will take place in the concert hall of St. Jakobshalle, and the dates have already been set: the semi-finals are scheduled for May 13 and 15, while the final will take place on May 17. Information about this is published on the official website of the competition.

When choosing the host city of Eurovision, Basel was competing with Geneva. However, other major Swiss cities such as Zurich and Bern, which also applied, did not become the main candidates. Among the main selection criteria, the possibilities of the city's infrastructure and the conditions on the site itself for receiving thousands of delegation members, competition fans and journalists from different parts of the world were taken into account.

It is worth noting that this is the sixth year in a row that the Eurovision Song Contest is not held in the capital of the country. The competition was last held in the capital in 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2024, the event took place in Malmö, Sweden, in 2023, due to the war in Ukraine, the contest was moved to Liverpool, England, and in previous years, the Eurovision Song Contest was hosted by Turin, Italy (2022) and Rotterdam, Netherlands (2021).

It is interesting that in 2020 the competition was not held at all due to the Covid-19 pandemic, although it was supposed to take place in Rotterdam. In 2019, Eurovision took place in Tel Aviv, which Israel does not consider its official capital, despite the fact that many countries have embassies there.

Switzerland will host the Eurovision Song Contest for the third time. It happened for the first time in 1956, when the first competition was held in Lugano, and the Swiss singer Liz Assia won. Switzerland won for the second time in 1988 thanks to the Canadian singer Celine Dion, and the following year the competition was held in Lausanne. In 2024, Switzerland won the contest again with the song "The Code" performed by Nemo, a non-binary artist. Therefore, Eurovision 2025 will be held for the first time in the German-speaking part of the country, which emphasizes the diversity of Switzerland's cultural environment.