Contes et Rencontres Festival

A pioneering storytelling festival in France

Created in 1992, the Contes et Rencontres festival is one of the oldest and most recognized contemporary storytelling festivals in France. Born from the cultural dissemination policy initiated with the Cévennes National Park in the early 1980s, it has been coordinated since its origins by the Departmental Federation of Rural Foyers of Lozère, a socio-cultural network committed to the values of popular education.

Every year in February, for two weeks, the festival transforms Lozère into a land of tales and stories. The 70 rural foyers spread across the department mobilize to host artists and offer the public intimate and warm evenings, in villages where culture meets the inhabitants.

Contemporary storytelling in all its forms

At the forefront of the revival of storytelling in France, Contes et Rencontres programs a dozen artists each edition for around 35 performances. Storytellers, actors, and musicians from all over France and sometimes from abroad share the Lozère stages to offer shows that reinvent the art of narrative: revisited traditional tales, contemporary creations, performances mixing spoken word, music, and gestural theater.

The festival is not limited to classic storytelling. It explores the boundaries between theater, literature, and spoken word arts, inviting artists with unique universes who push the limits of oral narration. Each edition is built around a theme that guides the programming and creates a common thread between the shows.

A traveling festival rooted in rurality

The originality of Contes et Rencontres lies in its profoundly traveling and rural nature. The performances are not concentrated in a single city but are deployed throughout the department, from Mende to Florac, from Marvejols to Aumont-Aubrac, including towns with a few hundred inhabitants. This capillary diffusion allows it to reach audiences far from traditional cultural circuits and create unique moments of sharing in atypical venues: village halls, rural foyers, renovated barns.

The festival welcomes an average of 4,000 spectators each year, a remarkable figure given the low population density of the least populated department in France. The evenings take place in a friendly atmosphere where proximity between artists and the public is favored.

Workshops and transmission

Beyond the performances, Contes et Rencontres offers storytelling practice workshops for amateurs and more experienced storytellers alike. These training and sharing sessions are essential to the festival's mission: to keep the art of storytelling alive on a daily basis, beyond the festival period, by nurturing a network of passionate practitioners in the Lozère region.

For its 35th edition in 2026, the festival celebrates transmission: stories, memories, and cultures passed down from generation to generation. A theme that resonates with the very essence of storytelling, an ancient art of shared speech.