Last week we made the mad dash down to the south of France for the Wheels & Waves Festival.

Photo @lugarts

The event  brings together enthusiasts from an incomparably broad spectrum of sub-cultures, but at its core it’s a celebration of custom bikes, art, music, skateboarding and surfing.

Spread across several locations, the event’s highlights include a huge art show in a hollowed out warehouse on the outskirts of San Sebastian, a vintage bike sprint in the Pyrenees, and of course the logging invitational, hosted at Milady beach, just a stones through from the event’s main site.

Photo @pindygram

The raft of entertainment at the bustling central village, situated at Cite de l’Ocean was so diverse that a mere hundred steps would carry you from gazing down as bikers tackled the iconic wall of death, past the stage with its all time line up of acoustic acts and DJ’s, to a delightfully air conditioned cinema, playing all manner of beautifully put together surf films. Whilst a few meters above your head, skaters carve the perfectly contoured bowl, sunken into the roof of the Cité de l’Océan.

Photo @pindygram

Whilst the beating sun, roar of engines, stench of petrol and hot, beer soaked leather presented a jamboree for all the senses of those in attendance, technology does not yet allow us to capture and transmit most of these stimuli to you, so please accept our simple visual offering featuring some of our favourite moments:

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See much more of what went down, and meet some of the events most intriguing characters in issue 251 of Wavelength, out next month. 

We’d like to thank our friends at Flat-Out magazine, Indian Motorcycles, Krammer & Stoudt, Brittany Ferries & VW for helping us get there and ensuring we had an absolute blast upon our arrival. 

Photos @pindygram & @lugarts