Enjoy golden fruit parades, citrus displays in the Biovès gardens, light displays, night parades, floats, animations, mask parades, marching bands, and all the amazing sculptures made from lemons.
The Menton Lemon Festival takes place every year for about two weeks, in the second half of February, to coincide with the carnival.
It is the second event on the French Riviera, after the carnival in Nice, to attract so many visitors, about 200,000.
Thousands of hours of work, hundreds of people and tons of citrus fruits are required each year to create wonderful sculptures that always reflect different themes.
The history of this exhibit dates back to 1929, when in the city of Mentone, the first lemon producer on the entire continent, a hotelier came up with the idea of organizing an exhibition of flowers and citrus fruits in the gardens of the Hotel Riviera. It was such a success that the following year the festival took to the streets: floats with orange and lemon tree shrubs parade elegantly through the city streets. The municipality, eager to develop the tourist industry, tried to give the parade a typically local color. A few years later, in 1934, the fête du citron-the lemon festival-was officially born.
The Menton Lemon was recognized for its specificity and excellence by a protected geographical index in 2015.
This citrus fruit is for Menton an essential part of its history and heritage.
At the end of the carnival, all citrus fruit will be recovered and sold at very low prices or given away.
So come and enjoy the Mentone Lemon Festival, this spectacular display, the parades of floats, even at night, and the light shows. Don’t forget to also visit the Craft Fair and the Orchid Festival, with their unique scents.