Events and festivals in Occitania on 29-30 August 2026: more than 110 drummers parade through Bruniquel by night, Visa pour l'Image opens in Perpignan and the Rose Festival plays its last night near Toulouse.
Drums in a medieval village. Bruniquel, in the Tarn-et-Garonne, hands its Saturday 29 August over to the Brazilian percussion of the Nuits Frappées. More than 110 drummers parade through its lanes by night this weekend, while Visa pour l'Image opens in Perpignan and the Rose Festival plays its last night near Toulouse.
Les Nuits Frappées, a batucada with no equivalent in Europe
On Saturday night, Les Nuits Frappées de Bruniquel send more than 110 percussionists through the lanes of the medieval village and onto the Esplanade des Châteaux. The Sambafunk Factory association runs this gathering of batucada and Brazilian percussion, the only one of its kind in Europe.
One night only, on 29/08/2026.
The musicians come from all over France and beyond. Split into several batucada groups, they move through the village in a night-time procession, a column of drums winding between the medieval houses and the esplanade, with the crowd walking behind. The show is the procession itself.
The event returns every year at the end of August. In a region where the last weekend of summer lines up ferias, village fetes and big open-air stages, Bruniquel has picked pure percussion, with no backdrop but its stones.
Rose Festival, guitars at the Palace of the Kings of Majorca and rockabilly in the Tarn
At the MEETT exhibition centre in Aussonne, the Rose Festival dreamed up by Toulouse artists Bigflo & Oli with Bleu Citron closes out three nights of rap, pop and electro on Saturday, at the venue it takes over every late summer. In Réalmont, the Festival American Night & Day lines up more than 350 American and classic cars at the Foirail, rock and rockabilly concerts from the 50s and 60s, pin-ups and a crowd of more than 10,000, free of charge.
Perpignan plays two hands at once.
The Palace of the Kings of Majorca lends its gardens to Guitares au Palais until Sunday, a free festival founded in 2004 by guitarist Pedro Soler, where classical guitar, flamenco, jazz and gypsy music share the bill. Visa pour l'Image, created in 1989 by Jean-François Leroy and now the largest international photojournalism festival in the world, opens more than twenty free exhibitions across the city on Saturday. From late August to mid-September, Perpignan runs on press photography, of which it becomes the world capital.
In the Lot, Prayssac en Fête serves three nights of free concerts on the Place Dutours, from ska-punk to world music, carried by the local festival committee and some sixty volunteers since 2012, faithful to the last weekend of August.