Dax is a spa town in the Landes that empties its streets of cars for five days in August and fills them with bodegas, bandas and a crowd in white and red. It is one of the three great south-western ferias alongside Bayonne and Mont-de-Marsan, and like them it is built on peñas — neighbourhood and club associations that run the bars and the music.
The Landes contribution to the bull programme is the course landaise, in which écarteurs and sauteurs dodge and vault over a charging cow without harming it; it is a sport of timing and nerve, locally followed, and entirely distinct from the Spanish corrida, which Dax also stages.
No attendance figure is published.
The five days are anchored to the Assumption on 15 August, a national holiday, which places the feria in the single busiest travel week of the French year. Accommodation across the Landes coast is committed months ahead.
PlanningAnchored to the Assumption holiday on 15 August, so the five days sit around a fixed date.