Le Puy du Fou: A French Amusement Park

We toyed with visiting Eurodisney but in the end spent a whole day at Le Puy du Fou, a different kind of amusement park. Located in the Vendee region, about 200 miles south west of Paris, Le Puy du Fou park was founded over 30 years ago by locals who wanted to put on a show commemorating their history. Today, it's a large theme park that draws over a million visitors each year. Not only that, it's also a well-known school of the performing arts for the thousands of actors (many of them local teens and young adults) that participate in the shows.

Le Puy du Fou is different from other parks in the sense that it's composed of shows, not rides. When you arrive you're given a timetable of the day's events and can plan your visit around each of the spectacles you'd like to see: Musketeers, Knights, Vikings, Romans, and more. The main shows are elaborate and extravagant, rivaling any you might have seen elsewhere. Our favorite was the Roman one consisting of chariot races, gladiatorial battles, wild animals, and a few dead Christians. Another was a show where over a hundred birds of prey flew over our heads, including falcons swooping in at breakneck speeds from high in the sky.

In the evening we took in the "Cinescenie", the historical show I mentioned at the start of this post. Great fireworks, battles, and props were offset by longwinded dialog and slow parts. Worth seeing once IMO but no more.

All in all a fun, and very different, day.

Travel tips:
  • Probably obvious but plan on spending a whole day here, there's a lot to see
  • Book a week or more ahead and you'll get pretty sizable discounts
  • You're allowed bring food into the park if you want to save money
  • Pay close attention to the schedule, attend the shows in chronological order to make the most of your time
  • The Cinescenie starts between 22:00 and 22:30 and lasts over 1.5 hrs: make sure you're ready to stay up this late (or book into one of the adjoining, themed, hotels)
  • There's a strong Christian bent to many shows: Jeanne d'Arc figures in the medieval show, the Vikings are converted to Christianity by St. Cuthbert (who pops out of a big box), and the Christians eventually prevail in the Roman arena. Personally I could have done without this: Odin, Thor, Jupiter and Mars are all fine with me