Aberdeen - Event

The International Youth Festival is widely recognised as one of Aberdeen's most important annual cultural events, bringing together around 1000 young people from the world's finest youth orchestras, bands, dance and theatre groups.

With its roots in the 1960s, the festival originally moved around Europe before settling in Aberdeen in 1982. Since then, its popularity has rocketed.

Apart from fulfilling the founder's wish of including a greater variety of cultures, it now incorporates two summer schools for individual musicians and dancers, a fine-arts programme and a multi-arts project involving local young disabled people.

Recent international visitors have included groups from Prague, Belgium, Canada, Japan, Ukraine, Hong Kong and China, Israel, Singapore and Trinidad & Tobago, as well as groups from across Britain.

Each year the programme is announced in late June; keep an eye on the festival website for breaking news.