Three editions. A tripling of visitors. And a fourth edition already on the horizon. Here’s how a partnership between Les Terres de Nataé and China Light Festival became one of Europe’s most compelling light festival success stories.
Every autumn, outdoor venues across Europe face the same challenge. As the days grow shorter and visitor numbers dwindle, parks and animal sancuaries that thrived all summer suddenly find themselves navigating quiet pathways and tighter budgets. For most, the off-season is something to survive. For Les Terres de Natae, it has become something to celebrate.
Since 2023, the animal park in Pont-Scorff, in the heart of Birttany’s Pays de Lorient, has partnered with China Light Festival to host Les Animaux de Lumière – a large-scale, nocturnal light festival that transforms the park’s grounds into an illuminated wildlife sanctuary each autumn and winter. Now with three succesful editions behind it, and a fourth already in development, the event has grown from a bold experiment into a proven model for off-season revenue generation, community engagement, and conservation storytelling.
The numbers tell that story clearly.
Three editions, one clear trajectory
| Edition | Year | Visitors |
| 1st edition | 2023 | 37.000 |
| 2nd edition | 2024 | 57.000 |
| 3rd edition | 2025 | 71.000 |
From 37,000 visitors in the debut year to 71,000 in 2025, Les Animaux de Lumière has nearly doubled its audience across just three editions. That growth is not the result of luck — it is the product of a partnership built for continuous improvement, and a venue that understood early what a well-produced light festival could do for its programming calendar.
A partnership rooted in shared values
When Sébastien Musset took over the former Pont-Scorff Zoo in 2021 and relaunched it as Les Terres de Nataé in 2022, he built the park around a clear mission: conservation, education, and a genuine commitment to endangered species. The park today houses over 120 species and 350 animals, including several classified as critically endangered by the IUCN.
For China Light Festival, that mission alignment was immediately recognisable. Our festivals have always been rooted in themes of wildlife, biodiversity, and the natural world. We don’t impose a generic spectacle onto a venue — we design experiences that amplify what a venue already stands for. At Les Terres de Nataé, our lanterns became an extension of the park’s conservation purpose rather than a departure from it.
Each edition’s theme has reflected this directly. The festivals have featured handcrafted installations celebrating endangered and extinct species — pterodactyls, orangutans, dodo birds, mammoths, and more, all rendered in steel, hand-painted fabric, and light. In the 2024 edition, China Light created a custom installation of the Atlantic puffin (macareux moine) specifically for Les Terres de Nataé — a nod to the last remaining French colony of this species, found in the archipelago of Sept-Îles in Côtes d’Armor, where fewer than 200 breeding pairs remain today, down from 10,000 in 1950.
The festival does not just entertain. It educates, and that is by design.
The infrastructure of a true partnership
What makes the China Light model distinct, and what Les Terres de Nataé understood from the start, is that this is not a rental arrangement. It is a genuine co-creation.
China Light holds an exclusive partnership with Les Terres de Nataé for the entire region of Brittany, a commitment that reflects both parties’ belief in the long-term value of this collaboration.
“Les Animaux de Lumière is a festival conceived a year in advance with our partner China Light,” Musset has explained. “We decide on the theme and design of the next edition’s installations together, even as the current one is taking place.”
Each autumn, a team of approximately 30 specialists, welders, painters, and seamstresses, travels to Pont-Scorff to install the festival over the course of a full month. Structures range from five to six metres tall; some scenes extend ten metres wide. Some are motorised, giving animated life to a bird’s wingbeat or a predator’s jaw. The result is not a collection of decorations, it is a curated, immersive world that transforms familiar pathways into something genuinely new each year.
Resilience under pressure
The strength of the partnership was tested during the very first edition, when Storm Ciaran swept through the region in late 2023, uprooting over 70 trees in the park and damaging several light installations. The park mobilised all available staff to manage the aftermath and ensure the safety of its animals. China Light simultaneously deployed every available technician to repair and restore the festival installations.
Against all odds, Les Animaux de Lumière reopened just 15 days after the storm — and the first edition still welcomed 37,000 visitors despite the disruption. That resilience, and the trust it demonstrated on both sides, helped lay the foundation for everything that followed.
A first for regional France
There is one detail about this partnership that deserves particular attention for any venue director reading this: when the first edition launched in 2023, it marked China Light Festival’s first collaboration with a venue outside a capital city or major urban centre in France. Until that point, China Light’s French presence had been anchored in Paris (Jardin des Plantes) and comparable flagship venues.
Les Terres de Nataé proved what we had long believed: that a beautifully produced, thematically coherent light festival can draw regional audiences in extraordinary numbers — provided the partnership, the production quality, and the venue’s identity are genuinely aligned.
“We’re proud to have brought them to our Breton territory,” said Valy Gourdon, Communications Manager at Les Terres de Nataé. “They had collaborated with the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and Cologne Zoo in Germany. Here in Pont-Scorff, it was their first time outside a capital or major city.”
Beyond the gate: a new revenue season
The commercial case for the partnership extends well beyond ticket sales. A nocturnal festival does not compete with a park’s daytime programming — it opens an entirely new revenue window during hours when the venue would otherwise be closed. For Les Terres de Nataé, Les Animaux de Lumière has created meaningful income across food and beverage, merchandise, and increased daytime membership conversions driven by festival awareness.
The success of the festival has already had a broader strategic effect on the park’s programming calendar. It convinced Musset to make nighttime events a permanent fixture at the park, with new nocturnal projects now in development for 2026.
Looking ahead to edition four
With three editions complete and a clear growth trajectory, 37,000, 57,000, 71,000, the partnership between Les Terres de Nataé and China Light Festival is entering its most exciting phase yet. Planning for the fourth edition is already underway, building on everything the previous three years have taught both teams about what this audience wants, what this venue can deliver, and what a light festival can become when it is rooted in genuine purpose.
For venue directors, parks, botanical gardens, and cultural institutions looking to transform their off-season into a destination season, this is the model to study.
The seasons will always change. But the dark months no longer have to mean empty pathways. They can mean something altogether different: a park alive with light, a community gathering around shared wonder, and a conservation story told in silk, steel, and colour.
If you’re ready to explore what a China Light Festival partnership could look like for your venue, we’d love to start the conversation.