Artists shape large sand sculptures at Croatian festival

Artists created massive sand sculptures reaching up to 15 meters in length at the 15th Sand Art Festival on Croatia's Rajska beach in Lopar on Friday (July 3).

The festival featured large sculptures including a giant squid, Mediterranean monk seal, turtle, and beach toys, each weighing approximately 20 tons.

Drone footage showed the impressive scale of the sculptures, with artists working to shape and maintain the towering sand creations. Festival manager Paula Banic Vudrag said that each sculpture told its own "sand story" as part of this year's theme.

"To make a sculpture like this, as big as 15 meters, it takes four full days of hard work," Banic Vudrag said.

Academic sculptor Jelena Azinovic worked on a Mediterranean monk seal measuring between 8 and 10 meters.     "This is a new medium for me to work with, sand, so I wanted to try it out a bit," she said.

This was the fifteenth annual Sand Sculpture Festival in Lopar, which aims to promote the town and the island of Rab as a tourist destination with its 22 sandy beaches - a rarity on Croatia's rocky Adriatic coast.

-Antonio Bronic, production: Antonio Bronic and Anna Lubowicka/Reuters