the essential
The city of Céret will launch the “Splendors of China” festival in 2025. An event in direct competition with the Lantern Festival… which will perhaps soon move to the Tarn.
This is surprise information which must not have made only people happy, in Tarn and Tarn-et-Garonne. The municipality of Céret, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, has indeed announced the launch of a new winter theme park entitled “Splendors of China”, as reported by our colleagues from L’Indépendant, Wednesday April 10, 2024.
The event is hosted by the company Soleil France, based in Carcassonne, and is part of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between France and the Middle Kingdom. Guoming Shi, the project’s producer, was present in Vallespir, alongside the event coordinator, Raphaëlle Richard, to draw up the outlines of this new event.
2,600 lanterns planned in Céret
According to the organizers, “it will be a magical, multi-activity theme park on mythology,” they explain to our colleagues at L’Indépendant. There will be around forty light displays made up of 2,600 traditional silk lanterns. They have required several months of manufacturing in the Sichuan region and will be assembled on site by a team of fifteen people from China over a month and a half.”
Even if the organizers deny it, how can we not see it as a direct competitor to the Lantern Festival, born in Gaillac and which could soon make its return to the Tarn. Based in Montauban, since winter 2022, after a short break in Blagnac, the festival is eyeing the Cap’Découverte leisure center. The joint union which manages it has launched a European call for tenders to organize a festival of this type on the former mining site.
A scenario which could be eclipsed by the arrival of a new actor. Lantern festivals attract visitors from all over Occitania, not to mention France and even Europe.
The date of the event in Vallespir is already known: from November 15, 2024 to February 16, 2025. That is to say approximately the same period as the current festival, the second Tarn-et-Garonnaise edition of which took place at the Jardin des Plantes between December 15, 2023 and February 11, 2024. So, inevitably, competition would be head-on.
No comment from Montauban town hall
The use of the conditional is, however, always required. Because officially, there is no confirmation that a third edition of the event will take place in Montauban. If the initial pact between Patrice Gausserand, the creator of the Lanterns, and the Montalban municipality, ran for three years, the contract was denounceable at each stage. Relations between the two parties had also been refreshed during the preparation of the second edition.
But the apparent attendance success – no figures were communicated two months after the curtain came down – would have encouraged everyone to shake hands again for the winter of 2024-2025. To the detriment of Tarn projects?
