Travel: Puy du Fou, France

You don't need white-knuckle rides to keep your heart in your mouth at the French theme park sensation

Le Bal des Oiseaux Fantomes, The Ghostbird Ball, at Puy do Fou

It’s not just the medieval costumes of the hotel staff, nor the remoteness of the location.

I had been prepared for something different: I knew I was visiting a very popular theme park in the heart of Vendée in western France, that the theme was history but that there were no rides, so I had expected to be out of my metropolitan adult comfort zone. But I hadn’t expected to enjoy this surreal world so much – the immersiveness of it all and the sheer technical brilliance behind it.

I hadn’t anticipated being so scared, so thrilled and so totally engaged in the Puy du Fou experience, but here I am in a Coliseum-like structure jeering at the Romans as our Vendéen hero fights for his life.

For 40 minutes the action carries us along. Four chariots fly round in a furious race; exotic animals – ostriches, camels, tigers – share the stage with geese, and there are horses, acrobats and, at one point, a majestic lion calmly sits on our hero’s prison. The cheers, jeers and applause are deafening and I could almost be an inhabitant of this ancient Roman empire.

The public face of Puy du Fou has three elements: the Grand Parc, Cinéscénie and the Cité Nocturne with its five hotels.

The park’s wooded acres host 19 “spectacles” plus a series of experiences and period villages, as well as more than 20 places to eat – feeding up to 19,000 people a day mainly with locally sourced food and drink – plus plenty of toilets, a health clinic and even water misters to help you cool off.

The stats paint only half the picture. When you start to understand the organisation behind Puy du Fou, the true scale of this place hits home. Each day in the season that runs from April to September, 1,800 employees perform and manage the spectacles. They look after the horses, drive the chariots, manage the crowds, answer endless questions… and wish us “bon spectacle”.

Behind all the day-to-day running of the park are training academies – for the performing arts, technical skills and animal care – where youngsters can learn, and the best go on to work at the park. There is also a lot of expertise being built up, from studies into the horses’ well-being and bird conservation programmes to the development of sophisticated drones capable of synchronised flight.

In the park, no day is the same: the spectacles are staged in purpose-built arenas and the number of performances is calculated by the number of people expected in the park, the capacity of the arena and the length of the show. Visitors appear to buy into this completely and seeing as many spectacles as possible is part of the adventure.

It’s no wonder 2.2 million people visited Puy du Fou last year, making it the second most popular attraction after Euro Disney. And yet, few people in the UK seem to have heard of it.

Cinéscénie was the starting point for Puy du Fou: the Grand Parc’s attractions having been developed to provide daytime entertainment for Cinéscénie’s nightime audience. Now 40 years old, this really is spectacular. More than 13,000 people gather as 3,000 local volunteers put on a show that is an all-encompassing experience. It wraps you in music and light, while the action carries you through the heartaches and thrills of a deftly told story. There is hardly time to marvel at the cast – not just the exuberant actors but the gaggles of geese, thundering horses and above all the special effects – as the emotional rollercoaster rattles on.

What is intriguing for me is that this is the inspiration for the English show which was the talk of last summer. Kynren, the colourful and energetic pageant of English history, is staged again this year in the shadow of Auckland Castle in County Durham. The Cinéscénie spectacle is just on a much grander scale.

As I bed down in La Citadelle, the medieval-style hotel which opened this season, I reflect on the earlier feast from a bountiful buffet of Vendéen delicacies, roast meats, regional cheese and traditional fruit tarts washed down with the rich local red wine. Contemplating the modern comforts of this faux ancient building and its costumed staff, I can hardly wait to find out what else can astound me.

The next morning, I’m in another era in a much more reflective mood. The Lovers Of Verdun is highly emotional. The letters of a woman to her man in the trenches of the First World War battlefields are the soundtrack. Enter this walk-through experience and you are transported to those trenches, noting the minutiae of life, feeling the damp, brought up short as the floor rocks with the explosions. It feels real, terrifying. Then, as you watch the nurses treating the lover, you glimpse the mesmerising loop of film of a soldier climbing a ladder, falling back and his comrades collecting his body.

The futility of war is writ large. But there is humanity in the poignant imagination of the Christmas truce of 1916.

If I had to pick a favourite spectacle, it’s a tough choice between the naval drama of Le Dernier Panache, and the bird show, Le Bal des Oiseaux Fantômes. The Dernier Panache illustrates the technical brilliance of the artistic team at Puy du Fou. In the purpose-built theatre, the audience is fully immersed in the tale of French sailor, Charette.

We explore below decks of the tall ship at dock in Brest; we feel seasick in the mountainous oceans as Charette goes to the American War of Independence, we share the terror of the Revolution’s attack on the Vendée. It’s an ingenious mix of film, tableau and live action which transports us through to Charette’s execution.

On the other hand, if you had told me last year I would go back a second time to watch birds in flight, I would have laughed: bird-watching is my idea of hell. Woven around a magical story of Éloïse and Aliénor, the birds swoop into the stadium, and quickly I fall in love with their grace and speed. There’s the secretary bird strutting comically through its fight with a snake; the falcons, owls and buzzards taking their cue from the falconers’ lure of food. Then from the grey hot air balloon, a sweeping dot evolves into an eagle gliding down towards us – then another follows.

Most of all the sight of geese flocking behind the microlight as it traverses the sky and the downdraught as birds power inches above my head is an image that has stayed with me and something I will find hard to match.

FACTFILE

Puy du Fou, Les Epesses, Vendée, www.puydufou.com

There is a range of tickets for Puy du Fou: an adult day-ticket for the Grand Parc is from €33 in advance (child €28); or with Cinéscénie €54 (child €36). An Emotion Pass, which gives fast access to special seating areas for the spectacles, is from €12. Hotels from €54 per night per person, including a one-day ticket to the Grand Parc.

Puy du Fou is about an hour’s drive from both Nantes and Poitiers. There are direct flights to Poitiers from Edinburgh with Ryanair until September 2017 with prices from £19.99, one way, (including all taxes, charges and two carry-on bags). You can also fly to Nantes from Gatwick, Birmingham, Heathrow and Southampton.