Sand Sculpture Festival in Blankenberge

Every year at the beginning of summer, an amazing sand sculpture festival is held on the coast of the Belgian town of Blankenberge, attracting thousands of people to the city.

Every year, the sculptors participating in the festival are given a new topic for creativity, so that the sculptures do not repeat themselves and each time something new is obtained. In 2012, the theme was children’s fairy tales and cartoons

This time, 40 professional sculptors from all over the world took part in the festival, occupying a total space of 4,000 square meters with their sculptures.

An interesting feature of the Blankenberg Festival is that the sculptures are created right in front of everyone, from the sand, which is full on this beach — in fact, where there was nothing before, entire cities grow out of this very «nothing».

In total, 150 sand sculptures were created, each of which is much taller than human growth. It took more than 10 thousand tons of sand to create them.

The theme of animals in one of the previous years of the festival

At night, all the sculptures are covered with special awnings, the lights are turned on and visitors are now walking through completely different fairy tales, much more realistic due to unnatural lighting.

Last year, the theme for the sculptors was the movie saga «Pirates of the Caribbean»

The festival, as usual, lasted all summer and was closed only on September 2, when the weather began to deteriorate. Earlier we wrote about another interesting sand sculptor — Calvin Seibert, who creates three-dimensional geometric sculptures in response to «ordinary», in his opinion, banal sandcastles