Every festival in the atlas, country by country.
8 festivals
مهرگان
The ancient Iranian autumn festival of Mehr — friendship, affection and the harvest. Tables are laid with pomegranates, apples and grapes, prayers are said, and there is music, dance and, in places, wrestling.
October 2 – November 2, 2026Estimated
شب یلدا
On the longest night of the year, families gather at the homes of their elders to stay up late around a table of pomegranates, watermelon, nuts and dried fruit, reading Hafez and telling stories until well after midnight.
December 21, 2026Calculated
جشن سده
In the depth of winter, fifty days before spring, a great bonfire is lit at sunset. People gather around it to sing, dance and pray, offer blessings and fruit, and celebrate the passing of the coldest days.
January 30, 2027Calculated
چهارشنبهسوری
On the eve of the last Wednesday of the Iranian year, bonfires are lit in yards, streets and on rooftops, and people leap over the flames, asking the fire to take away their pallor and give them its red glow for the year ahead.
March 16, 2027Calculated
نوروز
Nowruz, “new day”, is the Iranian New Year. It begins at the March equinox, when families gather around the Haft-sin table to wait for the exact moment the year turns, and opens two weeks of visits, food and time outdoors.
March 21, 2027Calculated
سیزدهبدر
On the thirteenth day of the Iranian New Year, the whole country heads outdoors. Families picnic in parks and fields, and the sprouts grown for the Haft-sin table are thrown into running water, closing the Nowruz holidays.
April 2, 2027Calculated
گلابگیری
When the Damask roses bloom around Kashan, families pick them before sunrise and distil rosewater in copper stills the old way. Visitors can join the harvest, tour the distilleries and watch the golab being made.
May – June 2027Approximate window
جشن تیرگان
An ancient midsummer festival of water and rain. People splash each other with water, dance and recite poetry, share spinach soup and saffron rice pudding, and tie rainbow-coloured bands around their wrists.
July 4, 2027Calculated
9 festivals
高山祭
Twice a year, in April and October, the old mountain town of Takayama brings out its lacquered, gilded yatai floats — twelve in spring, eleven in autumn — and on the first evening hangs them with hundreds of lanterns.
October 9 – 10, 2026Calculated
秩父夜祭
On a cold December night in the mountains of Saitama, six great floats blazing with lanterns are hauled through Chichibu and up the steep Dango-zaka slope, while fireworks burst over the town.
December 2 – 3, 2026Calculated
節分
The day before spring begins in the old reckoning, when dried beans are thrown to drive out misfortune — “Demons out, good luck in!” Temples and shrines hold public bean-throwing, and the date is set by the sun, not the calendar.
February 3, 2027Officially announced
葵祭
On 15 May a procession in the court dress of the Heian era leaves the Kyoto Imperial Palace for the Shimogamo and Kamigamo shrines. It is one of Kyoto’s three great festivals, and once so central to court life that “the festival” simply meant this one.
May 15, 2027Calculated
祇園祭
Kyoto’s great summer festival lasts the whole of July. Its high points are the lantern-lit yoiyama evenings and the processions of towering yamahoko floats on 17 and 24 July, built and hauled by the city’s own neighbourhoods.
July 1 – 31, 2027Calculated
七夕
The star festival of the seventh night of the seventh month. Most of Japan keeps it on 7 July; Sendai, one of several places that kept the old season, hangs its great paper streamers from 6 to 8 August.
July 7, 2027Calculated
郡上おどり
For more than thirty summer nights the castle town of Gujo Hachiman dances in the streets — and it is a dance to join, not to watch. Over Obon the dancing goes on all night, until the hour before dawn.
July – September 2027Approximate window
お盆
Japan’s summer days of the dead, when ancestors are said to come home for a few days. Families light lanterns to guide them, visit graves, and at the end set lanterns on the water to send them back. Mostly kept in August; in some places in July.
July 13 – 15, 2027Calculated
青森ねぶた祭
For six nights in August, giant paper figures lit from within are hauled through Aomori to flute, drum and gong, with thousands of costumed dancers leaping alongside. Anyone may join the dancers — the costume is the only ticket.
August 2 – 7, 2027Calculated
4 festivals
Şeb-i Arûs
Every December, Konya remembers the death of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, which he himself called his wedding night. For eleven days the city holds sema ceremonies of the whirling Mevlevi, concerts, poetry and exhibitions, ending on the night of 17 December.
December 7 – 17, 2026Calculated
Mesir Macunu Festivali
Each March in Manisa, a healing paste of forty-one spices and herbs is wrapped in thousands of small papers and thrown from the minaret and domes of the Sultan Mosque, while crowds below compete to catch a piece — a custom kept for some four hundred years.
March 21 – 24, 2027Calculated
On 6 May, the day nature is said to awaken, Türkiye celebrates spring. People write wishes and leave them at rose trees, gather in green places outside town, and keep old customs of water and wild flowers for health and plenty in the year ahead.
May 6, 2027Calculated
Kırkpınar Yağlı Güreşleri
Every summer in Edirne, wrestlers slick with oil and wearing leather kıspet trousers fight for the Golden Belt and the title of Chief Pehlivan, to the sound of drum and shawm — a festival that counts its editions in the hundreds.
June – July 2027Approximate window
4 festivals
موسم طانطان
At the edge of the Sahara, nomadic peoples from more than thirty tribes gather for a great annual fair of camels and horses, tents and trade, Hassani poetry and song — revived after a quarter of a century in which it could not be held.
October 3 – 7, 2026Officially announced
Id n Yennayer
The Amazigh new year, a national holiday in Morocco on 14 January. Families mark it with a special meal — in the Sous, a barley porridge called tagoula with smen and argan oil — and wishes for a year of plenty.
January 14, 2027Officially announced
مهرجان حب الملوك
Every June for more than a century, the town of Sefrou near Fez has celebrated its cherry harvest with a parade of floats, music and dance troupes, and a newly crowned Cherry Queen who hands out cherries to the crowd.
June 2027Approximate window
Festival Gnaoua et Musiques du Monde
Every June the Atlantic port of Essaouira fills with the rhythms of Gnawa — the trance music of a Sufi brotherhood — as master Gnaoua musicians share stages with artists from around the world.
June 24 – 26, 2027Officially announced
3 festivals
Día de Muertos
At the turn of October and November, Mexican families welcome their dead home for a brief visit. They build altars with marigolds, candles and the departed’s favourite food, decorate graves, and in some towns keep vigil in the cemetery all night.
November 1 – 2, 2026Calculated
Fiesta Grande de Enero — Parachicos
For almost three weeks every January, the dancers of Chiapa de Corzo put on carved wooden masks, shake their maracas and carry the images of their saints through the streets from morning to night, in the town’s Great Feast.
January 4 – 23, 2027Calculated
On two Mondays each July, delegations from the eight regions of Oaxaca climb the Cerro del Fortín to present their dances, music and costumes — the best-known indigenous gathering of its kind in Mexico, with a month of food, mezcal and craft fairs around it.
July 19, 2027Estimated
4 festivals
দুর্গাপূজা
For ten days each autumn Kolkata worships the goddess Durga — and turns into an open-air gallery. Clay images made from the mud of the Ganga fill thousands of pandals, drummers play, and crowds walk the city day and night until the images return to the river.
October 20, 2026Officially announced
दीपावली
The festival of lights. Over five days around the new moon of autumn, homes, temples and streets glow with oil lamps and lanterns, doorsteps bloom with rangoli, families share sweets and gifts, and the darkest night of the month becomes the brightest of the year.
November 8, 2026Officially announced
For the first ten days of December, the tribes of Nagaland gather at a heritage village in the hills near Kohima to share their songs, dances, crafts, games and food — the “Festival of Festivals”, named after the forest bird of Naga folklore.
December 1 – 10, 2026Calculated
होली
The festival of colours, love and spring. On the night of the full moon bonfires burn for Holika; the next day friends and strangers throw coloured powder and water at each other, sing, dance and share sweets — nowhere more exuberantly than in the towns of Krishna’s Braj.
March 23, 2027Officially announced
3 festivals
Falles
In March, Valencia fills its streets with giant satirical sculptures of cardboard and papier-mâché, shakes to the midday thunder of firecrackers, and then, on the night of 19 March, sets every one of the monuments on fire to welcome the spring.
March 15 – 19, 2027Calculated
Sanfermines
From noon on 6 July to midnight on 14 July, Pamplona dresses in white and red for its patron saint. A rocket opens the fiesta, giants dance through the old town every morning, bulls run through the streets at eight — and on the last night the whole city sings “Pobre de mí”.
July 6 – 14, 2027Calculated
On the last Wednesday of August, the small town of Buñol near Valencia hosts what is said to be the world’s biggest food fight — an hour in which thousands of ticket-holders pelt each other with tomatoes until the streets run red.
August 25, 2027Calculated
2 festivals
ลอยกระทง
On the full-moon night of the twelfth Thai month, people float small decorated baskets bearing a candle, incense and a wish on rivers, canals and ponds across Thailand. In Chiang Mai the night coincides with Yi Peng, when sky lanterns drift up into the dark.
November 25, 2026Estimated
สงกรานต์
The traditional Thai New Year falls in mid-April, in the hottest weeks of the year. Families gather, pour water over the hands of their elders and over Buddha images — and in the streets, the gentle blessing becomes a nationwide water fight.
April 13 – 15, 2027Calculated
3 festivals
Carnevale di Venezia
For two and a half weeks before Lent, Venice returns to the masks and costumes that made its carnival famous across Europe — banned for almost two centuries, revived in 1979, and now drawing millions of visitors to the city’s squares and canals.
January 23 – February 9, 2027Officially announced
Twice every summer, ten of Siena’s seventeen city wards race horses bareback three times around the Piazza del Campo. The race lasts about ninety seconds; the rivalries, alliances, pageantry and devotion around it last all year.
July 2, 2027Calculated
On the evening of 3 September, a hundred porters lift a tower some thirty metres tall and five tonnes in weight onto their shoulders and carry it through the medieval streets of Viterbo in honour of the city’s patron saint.
September 3, 2027Calculated
4 festivals
Festividad de la Virgen de la Candelaria
Each February, Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca honours its patron saint with Peru’s largest festival of music and dance — about a hundred thousand dancers and ten thousand musicians, most of them Quechua and Aymara, and weeks of masses, processions and contests.
February 1 – 15, 2027Estimated
Quyllurit'i
In a high valley below the glaciers of the Cusco region, tens of thousands of pilgrims gather each year for the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i — a feast that joins Catholic devotion to older Andean beliefs about nature and the stars, with a hundred dances and a day-and-night procession to greet the sunrise.
May 25, 2027Estimated
Corpus Christi del Cusco
On the feast of Corpus Christi, the parishes of Cusco carry fifteen images of saints and virgins into the Plaza de Armas, where they process with the cathedral’s gold and silver monstrance and then stay in the cathedral for a week — a Catholic feast shaped by centuries of Andean devotion and rivalry.
May 26 – 27, 2027Calculated
Every 24 June, Cusco stages the great sun festival of the Inca Empire — a procession from the temple of Qorikancha through the Plaza de Armas to the stone terraces of Saqsaywaman, with hundreds of performers, revived in 1944 from the accounts of a sixteenth-century chronicler.
June 24, 2027Calculated