European Stone Festival 2023 Salzburg

The European Stone Festival is back this year, this time in Salzburg, Austria.

From 2 to 4 June, the Festival's Austrian friends of the Steinzentrum Hallein will be welcoming more than 120 stonemasons and stone carvers from all over the world to Salzburg, where they will have the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and creativity to an international audience.

Since the festival was launched at the end of the 1990s in Freiburg, Germany, it had, until Covid-19 hit, become an annual event hosted in various European countries. It was to have returned last year, when the Piece Hall in Halifax would have hosted the event but, again, it became a casualty of Covid. It is now rescheduled to come to Halifax in 2016.

In the meantime, the theme for this year's Festival in Salzberg is:

103 years of the Salzburg Festival

The European Stone Carving Festival is being held in the Kapitelplatz in Salzburg, the ideal setting for this international stone carving event because the city is closely linked to the art and craft of stonemasonry and stone carving.

The festival is organised by the Steinzentrum Hallein and the Association of Stonemasons & Stone Carvers of Salzburg.

If you want to take part in the competition, the deadline for online registration is 16 April. There is an entry fee of €30 for apprentices and €55 for qualified masons/stone carvers, master masons and sculptors. There is information now available about how to register on the Festival website at www.stein-festival.de.

Accommodation is not included in the entry fee and participants are asked to book their own rooms at the nearby youth hostel, where rooms have been reserved for those taking part in the Festival. Prices start at €38 a night. For anyone not participating but wanting to visit there are plenty of hotels in Salzberg.