Discover what exceptional festival lies beneath orange and lemon peels!
The 82nd Lemon Festival in Menton will be celebrated from Saturday 14th February to Wednesday 4th March. This year’s theme is: Tribulations of a lemon in China.
Menton’s well-known Festival is a unique event that attracts more than 160,000 worldwide visitors every year, and this number is constantly rising!
How exciting! Marvelous decorations, incredible 10 meter tall designs, floats containing over 140 tonnes of lemons and oranges. For three weeks, the Bioves Gardens and the streets are full of these citrus giant decorations. You can meet over 300 professionals who work on the project.
The Lemon Festival is, after Nice Carnival, the second most important event on the Riviera.
Join along the parade of floats, gardens of lights and the exhibition of giant designs, and discover this magical celebration!
Where does the Festival come from?
In 1928, Menton was the leading lemon-growing city in Europe. At the time, an hotelier organized an exhibition of flowers and citrus fruits in the gardens of the Hotel Riviera. His exhibition was such a success that the event became a parade with carts covered with orange and lemon trees the following year.
The municipality was then seeking to develop tourism in Menton, and gave the event a local color in 1935: The Lemon Festival was born. The festival was a huge success and continued on year over year with some famous visitors (European Kings and Queens…). Streets were lively animated and parades went on throughout the night.
This year’s celebration
For its 82nd edition, the Festival will honor French writer Jules Verne’s work « Les Tribulations d’un Citron en Chine » (Tribulations of a lemon in China).
From the 14th of February to the 4th of March, only a few weeks after Christmas, Bioves gardens will transform into an identical replica of The Middle Kingdom, using citrus fruits! Tonnes of oranges and lemons will be used to build up the patterns of the pagodas, dragons and other Asian temples. This theme is based on Jules Verne’s writing, particularly for the patterns and animations.
If you pay close attention, you just might bump into Shaolin monks!
Click here to find out more about the program