WestCoast Playground Festival 2026 turns Uddevalla into parkour hub

WestCoast Playground Festival 2026 opened in Uddevalla on June 30 and runs through July 4, turning Svenskholmen and Bohusgården into a five-day parkour and movement base. The festival has leaned hard into scale and access: elite showcases sit alongside try-it activities, open jams, coached workshops and a rebound-therapy program that is free and requires no advance booking.

The daily schedule is built to move people through the sport, not just watch it. Each day includes Ninja School, Rebound Therapy workshops, parkour workshops, open jam competition blocks and Meet the pros sessions, giving hobbyists and serious practitioners the same venue and the same field of play. Nordic Ninjas described WCPF 2026 as returning for a third year in a row, and this edition is being staged in a new Uddevalla location rather than the festival’s earlier Tjörnbro Arena setting.

The new site helps explain the event’s appeal. Svenskholmen sits on a half-island beside the fjord entering Uddevalla city, with views of the Uddevalla Bridge, sunsets, warm swimming water, sauna and a restaurant-bar on site. Bohusgården is the partner hotel, listed at Nordens Väg 6, 451 43 Uddevalla, and festival attendees can also add a sleeping spot in a shared sleeping area. That setup gives the event the feel of a temporary training campus as much as a competition weekend.

The competition side still matters, but it is folded into the wider festival rhythm. WCPF’s parkour competition format emphasizes flow and composition, with routines judged over 20-to-40-second runs, a format that rewards clean linking and control as much as difficulty. Nordic Ninjas has framed the gathering as a world-class parkour, tricking and trampoline camp with jam and competition, and the 2025 broadcast credits behind the event included Hannes Larsson, Alternativ Aktivitet, West Coast Parkour Playground and Keep Smiling Visuals, with commentary from Davide Rizzi, Samuel Hedberg, Pedro “Phosky” Léon Goméz and Tomoya Suzuki.

The rebound-therapy program gives the festival its clearest public-facing edge. Sessions ran daily from 13:00 to 15:00, with themed days for profound intellectual disability and multiple disabilities, mobility and physical disabilities, social/emotional/mental health, intellectual disability and autism, and autism and ADHD. Led by experienced instructors together with international trainers from England, the program places inclusion inside the same trampoline and parkour environment that elite athletes use, making Uddevalla’s waterfront venue a rare mix of competition, coaching and public participation.