Menton Lemon Festival

The Menton Lemon Festival offers just the kind of vitamin C fix you need after a long, hard winter.
Menton is the lemon capital of France thanks to its warm climate, so this festival is a celebration of all things related to that fruit and its sister, orange.

The 78th Lemon Festival has just finished in Menton, southern France. It took place from Feb. 18 to Mar. 9, 2011. Sleepy Menton bursts into a riot of color for this huge citrus-scented celebration. The Lemon Festival, an event quite unique in the world, attracts each year more than 230,000 visitors – a constantly increasing attendance. It’s the second biggest event on the Riviera after the Carnival of Nice and before the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Monaco.

This year the theme of the festival was “The Great Civilizations”. About 145 metric tons of bright citrus fruits were used to create some large-sized sculptures like a giant mammoth, a Viking drakkar, a pre-Columbian temple, a Trojan horse and a Viking village.

Some pictures from the previous years: