A hill of beeches, a Renaissance ruin and a cast of volunteers.

Puy du Fou takes its name from a place. French Wikipedia describes the Puy du Fou as a lieu-dit, a named locality, in the commune of Les Epesses, in the Haut Bocage of the Vendée in western France, near Les Herbiers and Cholet. It traces the name to the Latin podium, a height or hill, and fagus, the beech tree, so the place name reads as “the hill of the beech” or “the summit of the beeches”. The site grew up around the ruins of the Château du Puy du Fou, a Renaissance castle, and the castle walls became the backdrop for everything that followed.

The show came before the park. French Wikipedia says that in 1977 Philippe de Villiers, after visiting the ruins of the castle, decided to create a show about the history of the region, and that he conceived, wrote and directed it. Its opening performance took place on 16 June 1978. The show was at the outset called Ce soir, la Vendée (“Tonight, the Vendée”) before it received the name it still carries, La Cinéscénie. Staged at night in front of the ruined castle, it follows the fortunes of a local family, the Maupilliers, from the Middle Ages to the Second World War, according to the same article. The article says the score for that opening production was composed by the guitarist Alexandre Lagoya.

Volunteers were the engine from the start. French Wikipedia says that between 500 and 600 performers took part in the opening performance, put on with the help of a handful of local volunteers, and that the volunteers are known as the Puyfolais.

That base also became a school. French Wikipedia says that in 1998 Puy du Fou created its own internal training programme, the Académie Junior, for young Puyfolais. Open from early October to mid-April, it lets members learn, during their weekly or school holidays, disciplines including costume, dance, illumination, sets and props, riding, falconry and flamenco.

From a show ground to a park of period villages, then a second site in Spain.

The park followed eleven years after the show. French Wikipedia says that in 1989 a daytime attraction called the Grand Parcours was created around a small reconstructed village of the eighteenth century and its artisans. Visitors were taken by boat from the entrance through the Puy du Fou forest to reach it. The village had originally been built for a historical film, Vent de galerne, according to the article, which says the Grand Parcours was renamed the Grand Parc in 1998.

The park then added one period setting after another. French Wikipedia lists a falconry show in 1991; a medieval town in 1995, with its chapel, lower and upper streets, shop signs and artisans such as a cooper and a portrait painter; and in 1997 a fort of the year 1000, where a Viking show featured a longship rising from the water. In 2001 came a Gallo-Roman stadium, a 115-metre arena modelled on the amphitheatre at Nîmes, for chariot races and gladiator scenes, and in 2003 a falconry show called Le Bal des oiseaux fantômes. A town of 1900 followed at the entrance in 2004, and a Roman-themed hotel, La Villa gallo-romaine, in 2007. French Wikipedia also says the site has been presided over since 2004 by Nicolas de Villiers.

The birds became part of the brand’s public image. NPR reported on 13 August 2018 that the park had put six trained rooks — Boubou, Bamboo, Bill, Black, Bricole and Baco — to work picking up small pieces of paper and cigarette butts in exchange for food, using a wooden box with one section to receive the litter and another to release a reward. NPR said the idea came from the falconer Christophe Gaborit, building on a falconry-show routine in which crows carried roses to a “princess” in a castle. Nicolas de Villiers told NPR the birds were not replacing cleaning staff and described the scheme as an educational programme aimed at visitors.

The format then travelled to Spain. Blooloop reported on 3 September 2019 that Puy du Fou España had opened near Toledo with the night show El Sueño de Toledo, which premiered on 30 August 2019 and runs for 70 minutes through 1,500 years of Spanish history. It said the site was then open on Fridays and Saturdays until the full park opened in 2021. A press release from Spain’s tourism board in March 2021 said the park had opened on 27 March with four new shows, four period towns and 30 hectares of landscape, eight minutes by car from the historic town of Toledo.

Design and documentation.

A theme-park identity has more than one carrier. There is the park mark at the gate, on tickets and on the road signs, but there is also a character who walks the paths, poses for photographs and appears on everything from the park map to a plush toy in the shop. A walk-around mascot is a logo that moves, so it has to read from a distance, survive being drawn by many hands over the years and stay recognisable when redrawn for a comic, a television spot or a seasonal poster. Beneath the park mark, each themed land usually speaks in its own lettering: a carved wooden sign in one quarter, painted shopfront capitals in another, riveted metal plates somewhere else. Rides often carry logos of their own, which work as sub-brands with their own colours and names while still sitting inside the park’s family.

The practical documents hold all of this together. Wayfinding signs and the printed or on-screen park map have to sort lands, rides, food and facilities into a system a visitor can follow at a glance, and they are often the one place where the separate themes share a common typeface, colour key and set of pictograms. Souvenir merchandise then carries the identity home, on mugs, caps, pins and bags that mix the park mark, the mascot and individual ride logos. After dark the brand changes medium again: lit facades, projections, fountains and seasonal illuminations turn buildings and water into surfaces for colour and light, and a park can look like a different place at night than it does by day.

A place name, a cast name and a run of period settings.

The Puy du Fou identity starts with a place name and a time of day. The name, as French Wikipedia explains it, describes a wooded hill in the Vendée, and the brand’s founding product was a show performed after dark in front of a ruined castle on that hill. The volunteers took their own name, the Puyfolais, from the same place, so the site, the show and the cast all share one root word.

The park extends the idea into daylight by building settings rather than rides. French Wikipedia’s chronology moves through an eighteenth-century village, a medieval town with shop signs and artisans, a fort of the year 1000, a Gallo-Roman stadium and a town of 1900, with themed hotels named for the periods they recreate. NPR’s 2018 report listed the shows visitors associate with the park — a Viking attack, chariot races, sword fights and falconry — and each of them comes with its own era of costume, lettering and architecture. Across those settings the common thread is history staged live, by day in the park and by night in the Cinéscénie.

The Spanish site shows how the name works abroad. Coverage in Blooloop in 2019 and the Spanish tourism board’s 2021 release both present the Toledo park as Puy du Fou España, keeping the French place name and adding the country, while its night show, El Sueño de Toledo, is named for its new home. In Spain, as in the Vendée, the night show came before the daytime park of period towns.

For a design guide, Puy du Fou shows how a brand can be built from a place name, a volunteer cast and a sequence of historical settings rather than from a character or a ride. Compare it with Parc Astérix, the French park that borrows its history from a comic, and Efteling, the Dutch park built around fairy tales. For this guide we use night-show indigo, torch amber and bocage green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Puy du Fou’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.