Ice skating at Végapolis, Montpellier — in August

How skating in August came about

By late August 2025 the chat had one subject: how to escape the heat. People were talking about kayaks, water, shade, plans for autumn. The organiser suggested an answer from an entirely different climate zone — go ice skating. Montpellier has a big indoor rink, Végapolis, over in the Odysseum district, and a ticket costs next to nothing. The announcement went up on 18 August, six days ahead: “Hi everyone! How about the Végapolis ice rink this Sunday?”

The invitation defused a beginner’s worries straight away: “Any level — you can hire skates,” and the programme was described honestly, with no fuss: “we can go round the rink as a group, take photos, or just stand by the boards and chat.” Knowing how to skate was not a requirement. Turning up was.

The logistics that actually mattered

The rink was open from 2 pm to 7 pm that day, and the group was called for 4 pm — enough slack for the ticket desk, the hire counter and lacing up, but still three hours of ice ahead.

The money: €10 a head, covering both entry and skate hire, with no limit on how long you stayed on the ice — a detail the organiser spelled out later, when the chat was already discussing doing it again. For a meet-up inside the city that is unusual: the whole afternoon fits into a single note, and you need neither a car nor a whole free day.

Kit was the one thing that is genuinely easy to forget in August: “Don’t forget a hat, gloves and socks!” The logic is simple. It is baking outside, walking out of the house in a woolly hat feels absurd, and twenty minutes on the ice is enough for your hands to go cold — especially if you are falling over. The socks are for the hired skates.

How it went

At 3:56 pm the organiser wrote straight from the ice: “We’re at the rink. Anyone who was planning to come — join us, we’re on the ice.” Around five o’clock a video from the rink landed in the chat. No photographs were posted that day — a couple of shots from the ice surfaced later, and they are in the gallery on this page.

Not many people came. No lists were kept and nobody did a head count, so the chat did not preserve a number — and we are not going to invent one. What it did produce was exactly what had been imagined: a small group, a circuit of the ice, shorts and woolly hats at the same time.

The real verdict arrived not that evening but over a week later. On 2 September the organiser wrote: “Shall we do skating again one weekend in October?” A format invented as a one-off escape from the heat was promoted to a repeat — which, in this community, is the most reliable review there is.

If you fancy the same

Indoor ice does not care what the weather is doing outside — that was the whole point of the idea. A meet-up like this asks for no preparation, no equipment and no skill: you can come on your own, and the boards are as good a place to get to know people as the shared table at the barbecue camping weekend.

We do not invent future dates: meet-ups like this are born in the chat a few days ahead — this one had six days’ notice. How it all works and how to join is on the community page.