On August 22-23, 2026, festivals and events fill Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes: Aurillac closes the world's largest street arts gathering on Saturday, while Riom-ès-Montagnes serves its blue cheese to more than 20,000 visitors.
Last full weekend of the month.
The Aurillac street theatre festival plays its final day on Saturday, August 22. Around it, late-summer festivals hold the whole region: blue cheese in the Cantal, metal in Saint-Flour, brass bands in the Val d'Ainan, dance at 1,800 metres above Morzine.
Four days of street theatre in Aurillac
More than 100,000 spectators and more than 600 companies from around the world: the Aurillac International Street Theatre Festival is the largest gathering anywhere devoted to street arts. It takes over the Cantal county town from August 19 to 22.
Saturday is its last day.
Michel Crespin founded it in 1986. Forty years on, the ÉCLAT association still runs the programme, and the principle has not changed: for four days in August the entire town turns into an open-air stage, squares, streets and courtyards included.
Street theatre has no auditorium, no numbered rows, no box office queue. In Aurillac that produces four days when a performance can start on any corner, and when the audience is counted in tens of thousands rather than in filled seats.
Six hundred troupes and a hundred thousand spectators in a single Massif Central town: nothing else in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes works at that scale this weekend.
Blue cheese, metal and brass bands
In Riom-ès-Montagnes, the historic home of the AOP cheese, the Fête du Bleu d'Auvergne gathers more than 100 exhibitors and over 20,000 visitors on Saturday and Sunday for tastings, cheesemaking demonstrations and cookery workshops. At the Stade de l'Ander in Saint-Flour, FuriosFest lines up 18 rock and metal bands from August 21 to 23, a sixth edition now stretched to three days. The Cantal Crossbones association started it in 2021.
Two Ardèche gatherings answer each other. Saint-Vincent-de-Barrès holds Festi'Wood on 22-23/08/2026, a rock weekend whose bar and food stalls carry local produce only; in Tournon-sur-Rhône and Tain-l'Hermitage, the Festival National des Humoristes opened nine days of comedy on Friday, with the free open-air Fest'Off given over to newcomers.
Six brass bands from across France.
They parade through the villages of the Val d'Ainan on Saturday afternoon, then face off that evening at the Combe site: La Valdingue is free, and Saint-Geoire-en-Valdaine has run it since 2018, on the initiative of Les Val'Daingues, the village's own amateur band.
Higher up, the Avoriaz Danse Festival opens on Saturday, August 22 above Morzine with a week of classes and workshops at 1,800 metres: 130 hours of dance, from Cuban salsa to ballroom styles, taught by teachers of international standing. On Sunday, Le Grand-Bornand turns pedestrian for Au Bonheur des Mômes, one of Europe's biggest performing arts festivals for young audiences, running to August 27.