Ice Cold Sculpture Festival in Bruges
As the weather starts to get really cold, embrace the festive chill with a visit to Bruges and the Ijs Sculpturen Festival writes Tomas Mowlam.
The festival brings amazing ice and snow sculptures each year to the centre of town, and this year’s theme is the film Ice Age 3.
Follow the adventures of Sid the Sloth, mammoths Manny and Ellie, sabre-tooth tiger Diego, and Buck the swashbuckling one-eyed weasel and all the other cheeky critters, through a magical world of ice, snow and light, that kids will love.
The sculptures are rendered in blocks of snow and ice inside a massive tent chilled to -6°C.
The artists come from China, Canada, the United States, Russia, Sweden, Finland, the Ukraine, The Czech Republic, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium.
They use chainsaws, drills, hammers and chisels to cut, shape, carve and polish over 300 tonnes of ice and 400 tonnes of snow into the entire world of Ice Age. Blocks of ice can even be ‘welded’ by using an iron to melt the surfaces together.
The level of detail that goes into organising the festival is amazing, for example the forklift trucks used to move the blocks run on gas, so that no soot from exhausts can discolour the ice.
The ice used to be shipped in from Swedish Lapland, but the artists now work on ice made in West Flanders, in Belgium, in special water tanks that mean no air bubbles can form so each ice block is solid and crystal clear.
The blocks of snow, in fact finely ground ice, are packed down inside wooden moulds for three days, before being worked on.
Based in central Bruges at Buiten Boninvest, it’s just five minutes from the famous Christmas market and ice rink.
It is €13 for adults, €11 for concessions, €9 for kids and under fours get in free.
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Image Credit: icesclupture.be
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