The story
Scheveningen Fireworks Festival in Scheveningen
The International Fireworks Festival in Scheveningen is a competitive pyrotechnics event held over two weekends each August on the North Sea coast near The Hague. Running since the late 1960s, it pairs two countries against each other each night, launching timed displays from barges offshore while more than 300,000 spectators watch from the beach, boulevard, and pier.
Scheveningen has been a seaside resort for longer than most of its Dutch competitors: fishing families settled the dunes north of The Hague for centuries before nineteenth-century tourism transformed the fishing village into a fashionable beach destination, complete with a grand pier and a wide promenade that still anchor the town today.