On 22-23 August 2026, the festivals and events of Hauts-de-France mostly happen after dark: Le Souffle de la Terre reopens at Ailly-sur-Noye with almost 800 volunteers, Beauvais lights up its cathedral, Le Touquet closes its piano week.
Almost eight hundred volunteers.
Le Souffle de la Terre started again on 21 August at Ailly-sur-Noye, in the Somme. On 22-23 August 2026, what's on across Hauts-de-France happens mainly at nightfall: Beauvais lights its cathedral, Lille projects onto its façades, Le Touquet closes its piano week.
Three thousand five hundred characters at Ailly-sur-Noye
Chemin d'Altforweiler, Ailly-sur-Noye. Almost 800 volunteers run Le Souffle de la Terre there, and the 2026 run opened on 21 August and holds until 19 September.
The show has come back to the same spot every summer since 1986.
Its living fresco covers 20,000 years of Picardy history in ninety minutes, mixing pyrotechnics, lighting, music and theatre. The association's volunteers play 3,500 characters, which works out at four or five parts each over a single evening.
No other sound-and-light show in Hauts-de-France works at that scale. Its claim to being the largest of its kind in the region rests on that arithmetic as much as on forty consecutive summers carried by one village association.
In a region where late August is mostly played out on the walls of monuments, this is the one production that puts an entire village on stage. 22 and 23 August fall on the opening weekend, two days after the première.
From Le Touquet to the Bay of the Somme
On Saturday 22 August, Les Pianos Folies du Touquet close their week at the Palais des Congrès of the seaside resort, with the French and international pianists the festival has gathered every August for more than fifteen years; the 2026 edition stops on 22/08/2026. The same evening, on Place de la Concorde in Neufchâtel-Hardelot, Les Estivales Musicales de Hardelot play their free 6.30 pm concert, with pop-rock, French variété, world music, blues or a tribute band depending on the Saturday.
Calais never closes.
Le Dragon de Calais walks Avenue Winston Churchill all year round: over fifteen metres of steel and carved wood designed by François Delarozière and Compagnie La Machine, breathing fire, smoke and water and carrying passengers on its back. Since its inaugural show in November 2019, the machine has become the city's flagship attraction.
In the Bay of the Somme this weekend, Chés Wèpes tours shows, storytelling, songs and traditional games from village to village around Saint-Valery-sur-Somme until 31 August, in the Picard language, as it has since 2000. In Amiens, the Festival International de Jardins sets some fifty contemporary works among the hortillonnages until 11 October, floating gardens shaped since antiquity and turned into an open-air museum each summer.