Germany’s best-known festivals follow the year from autumn to Lent — sixteen days of beer tents and brass bands at Munich’s Oktoberfest, Nuremberg’s Christmas market in the weeks before Christmas, and Cologne’s carnival, which opens on 11 November and peaks on Rose Monday.
Photo: Geolina163, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The three festivals in this atlas mark three seasons. Oktoberfest began with a royal wedding in Munich in 1810 and now runs from mid-September to the first Sunday in October. The Christkindlesmarkt fills Nuremberg’s main square from the Friday before the first Sunday of Advent until Christmas Eve. And the carnival season in Cologne opens at 11:11 on 11 November, pauses for Advent and Christmas, and returns to the streets in the days before Ash Wednesday.
Rhenish carnival, with all its local variants in Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf and beyond, is listed in Germany’s nationwide inventory of intangible cultural heritage kept under the UNESCO convention.
For sixteen days each autumn Munich’s Theresienwiese becomes the world’s largest folk festival — beer tents of the city’s own breweries, a funfair, costume parades and some seven million visitors — a tradition that began with a royal wedding in 1810.
September 19 – October 4, 2026Calculated
Kölner Karneval
Cologne’s “fifth season” opens at 11:11 on 11 November and explodes onto the streets in the days before Lent, when costumed crowds shout “Kölle Alaaf!” and more than a million people watch the Rose Monday parade throw sweets from its floats.
November 11, 2026Calculated
Nürnberger Christkindlesmarkt
From the Friday before Advent until Christmas Eve, around 180 traders set up red-and-white wooden stalls on Nuremberg’s main square, selling gingerbread, gold-foil angels and nativity figures to more than two and a half million visitors.
November 27 – December 24, 2026Calculated