The festival takes place inside the Cité, the restored double-walled fortress above Carcassonne that is one of France's most visited monuments. The principal venue is the open-air Théâtre Jean-Deschamps against the ramparts, which holds around 5,000, and the programme mixes international music headliners with opera, dance and theatre across July.
Its distinguishing feature is scale of free access: a large parallel programme plays in the lower town and the Cité at no charge, which makes the festival genuinely civic rather than a monument hire.
No attendance figure is published.
The Cité is a working tourist site at full summer pressure during the day, so performance evenings are the best time to be inside it — the day-trip coaches have gone and the walls are lit. The Bastille Day firework display over the fortress is a separate event and the single busiest night of the Carcassonne year.
PlanningA July-long window with a large free programme running alongside the ticketed nights.