Sand Sculpture Festival You Don’t Want to Miss

Discover sand sculptures created by world renowned sand artists.

Sand Sculpture Festival in Weston-super-Mare will be returning this June and with its theme of Fun and Games for this year’s sand sculptures.More than 250,000 people have visited the festival over the past six years and have been entertained, impressed and inspired by amazing sand sculpting. This year there will be some special events, extra children’s activities, live demonstrations and many ways for visitors to get involved and create their own sandy sculptures.

Fifteen professional sand sculptors will create this year’s festival exhibits; they will carve more than 4,000 tonnes of sand, working eight hours a day for nine days. The sculptures can easily last several months; the outdoor record is actually more than a year.

The sculptures are made purely of sand and water. Weston-super-Mare is the perfect venue for the sand sculpture festival because the resort’s sand grains have the right sort of sharp edges needed for sculpting. The sand is mixed with plenty of water and compacted into a dense mass; this is done by building pyramids of sand using wooden frames which are removed before sculpting begins. The sand sculptures are surprisingly robust, if it rains the rainwater drains into the sand and evaporates when/if it stops raining, if the rainstorm is severe the horizontal surfaces of the structure might get slightly dented when the raindrops hit them, but this is easily repaired. When the sculptures are completely finished they are sprayed with an environmentally friendly screen solution which adds a thin skin to the surface of the sculpture and repels some rain; contrary to popular belief this is not hairspray, egg white or concrete.

The Weston-super-Mare Sand Festival will open on 01 June and the opening weekend will feature a programme of special activities to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. The festival will be open every day until 09 September.

For further information, including opening times and ticket prices, visit www.westonsandsculpture.co.uk. And if you would like to have a look at some of the best sand sculptures in the world so far, have a look at our collection of photos posted on our Facebook page here.

To give you more flavour of the event, here are some of the sand sculptures built during previous years:
http://youtu.be/dpbvSZmwaZs