Empire Polo Club

From polo grass to the global dance floor geography

The night in 1993 when Pearl Jam played in Indio, far from the arenas tied to Ticketmaster, changed the destiny of these fields. Goldenvoice, with Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen, proved that the polo grass could host a massive concert in front of the Santa Rosa mountains. Six years later, on October 9 and 10, 1999, the same venue gave birth to the first edition of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, with Beck, Tool, and Rage Against the Machine on the main stages and, in the Sahara, Mojave, and Gobi tents, an electronic lineup that already brought together The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Richie Hawtin, Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson.

Sahara, Yuma, and the club built on the desert

What defines Empire Polo Club is not a brick nightclub, but an infrastructure capable of becoming, every April, one of the most influential dance floor geographies on the planet. The Sahara tent grew into a festival-scale electronic music hangar, with milestones like the return of Daft Punk in 2006. In 2013, Yuma arrived: an air-conditioned tent with a wooden floor and a club vocation, designed for house and techno with a different listening experience. The venue is not a party brand: it is the physical ground where those scenes unfold, are dismantled, and are reassembled on the same oasis.

A thousand-acre oasis with four venues

Alexander Haagen III founded the club in 1987 as the home of polo in the Coachella desert. The property covers around 1,000 acres of gardens and fields, with four permanent spaces: the Rose Garden, with about 8,000 rose bushes and an indoor pavilion; Hacienda del Toro, with a 16,000-square-foot fixed tent; The Forum, a 48,000-square-foot covered hall with a 60-foot ceiling; and Medjhool Lake, ten acres of lake, palm trees, and bridges inspired by Giverny, named after the estate's dates. The venue declares capacities ranging from intimate groups to about 90,000 guests and concentrates production, electricity, and rigging throughout the grounds.

Lease to Goldenvoice and life beyond April

In October 2021, the Haagen family signed a lease for operational control with AEG Presents' Goldenvoice until 2050. Competitive polo ceased to be held in November of that year. The calendar remains anchored to Coachella and Stagecoach (since 2007), and has also hosted Desert Trip (2016), Power Trip (2023), or Phish's Festival 8 (2009). The rest of the year it functions as a space for weddings, sports, fairs, and public events, with the same landscape of palm trees and mountains that, every spring, transforms into a dance floor.