The Brest International Maritime Festival will be taking place from 11th to 17th July 2008. It is a large sailing event organized in the west of France and guests of honor will be arriving from Croatia, Vietnam and Madagascar. According to the organizers, those three countries will be participating with vessels which, until recently, were quite unknown to the nautical heritage.
Two thousand traditional sailing boats from 25 different countries will take part in the event, amongst them large Russian sailing boats like the Sedova (1923, 117 m. long) and Kruzenshterna (1926, 114 m. long), fishing boats or yachts and vessels of the national navy.
This celebration of “sea and the marine world history” will be very useful to the port Chateau which used to be property of the national navy.
The event’s budget totals EUR 12 million.
The last celebration “Brest 2004” gathered 600 000 guests, amongst them 266 000 with paid tickets.