Todas as festas do atlas, país a país.
8 festas
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.
2 de outubro – 2 de novembro de 2026Estimada
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.
21 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
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.
30 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
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.
16 de março de 2027Calculada
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.
21 de março de 2027Calculada
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.
2 de abril de 2027Calculada
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.
maio – junho de 2027Período aproximado
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.
4 de julho de 2027Calculada
9 festas
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.
9 – 10 de outubro de 2026Calculada
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.
2 – 3 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
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.
3 de fevereiro de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
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.
15 de maio de 2027Calculada
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.
1 – 31 de julho de 2027Calculada
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.
7 de julho de 2027Calculada
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.
julho – setembro de 2027Período aproximado
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.
13 – 15 de julho de 2027Calculada
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.
2 – 7 de agosto de 2027Calculada
4 festas
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.
7 – 17 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
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.
21 – 24 de março de 2027Calculada
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.
6 de maio de 2027Calculada
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.
junho – julho de 2027Período aproximado
4 festas
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.
3 – 7 de outubro de 2026Anunciada oficialmente
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.
14 de janeiro de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
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.
junho de 2027Período aproximado
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.
24 – 26 de junho de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
3 festas
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.
1 – 2 de novembro de 2026Calculada
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.
4 – 23 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
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.
19 de julho de 2027Estimada
4 festas
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.
20 de outubro de 2026Anunciada oficialmente
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.
8 de novembro de 2026Anunciada oficialmente
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.
1 – 10 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
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.
23 de março de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
3 festas
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.
15 – 19 de março de 2027Calculada
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”.
6 – 14 de julho de 2027Calculada
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.
25 de agosto de 2027Calculada
2 festas
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.
25 de novembro de 2026Estimada
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.
13 – 15 de abril de 2027Calculada
3 festas
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.
23 de janeiro – 9 de fevereiro de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
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.
2 de julho de 2027Calculada
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.
3 de setembro de 2027Calculada
4 festas
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.
1 – 15 de fevereiro de 2027Estimada
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.
25 de maio de 2027Estimada
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.
26 – 27 de maio de 2027Calculada
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.
24 de junho de 2027Calculada
6 festas
中秋节
On the fifteenth night of the eighth lunar month, when the moon is held to be at its fullest and brightest, Chinese families gather to share mooncakes, carry lanterns and look at the moon — a harvest festival with the legend of Chang’e at its heart.
25 de setembro de 2026Calculada
春节
The first day of the Chinese lunisolar year is the most important holiday in Chinese culture — a season of homecoming, spring couplets on the door, a reunion dinner on New Year’s Eve and visits to relatives, which sets off one of the largest annual migrations in the world.
5 – 6 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
元宵节
On the first full moon of the Chinese year, the New Year season ends in light — lantern riddles, sweet rice balls, and great lantern fairs such as those at Nanjing’s Confucius Temple and in Zigong, Sichuan, which run from the Spring Festival to this night.
20 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
泼水节
In mid-April the Dai of Xishuangbanna welcome their new year by washing statues of the Buddha and drenching each other with water for luck — three days of dragon boat races, rockets, dances and a city-wide water fight in Jinghong.
13 – 15 de abril de 2027Estimada
端午节
On the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, crews race long carved dragon boats, families eat zongzi, and doors are hung with calamus and mugwort — a festival of remembrance and protection, the first Chinese festival inscribed by UNESCO.
9 de junho de 2027Calculada
火把节
At the height of summer the Yi of Liangshan and Yunnan light torches of wormwood and pine, carry them around their homes and fields to drive away misfortune, and dance around bonfires all night — with horse races, wrestling and bullfights by day.
27 de julho de 2027Calculada
4 festas
Tết Trung Thu
In Vietnam the Mid-Autumn full moon belongs to children — lantern processions after dark, star lanterns and masks, lion dances going from house to house, and tables of cakes, fruit and rice-dough figurines.
25 de setembro de 2026Calculada
Tết Nguyên Đán
The Vietnamese Lunar New Year is the most important celebration in Vietnam — a time to go home, tend ancestors’ graves, fill the house with peach or yellow ochna blossom, wrap sticky rice cakes, and take care over who crosses the threshold first.
6 – 8 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
Hội Gióng
Two villages on the edge of Hanoi re-enact the legend of Saint Gióng, the child who grew into a giant to drive out invaders — a battle fought with flag dances, drums and gongs against twenty-eight girl generals at Phù Đổng, and bamboo flowers carried up to the temple at Sóc.
11 – 13 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
Giỗ Tổ Hùng Vương
Early in the third lunar month, millions of Vietnamese climb Nghĩa Lĩnh mountain in Phú Thọ to honour the Hùng Kings, legendary founders of the nation, with processions of palanquins, drums and gongs, offerings of rice cakes and Xoan singing.
16 de abril de 2027Calculada
4 festas
추석
Korea’s harvest festival under the full moon of the eighth lunar month — three days when cities empty as families go home to honour their ancestors, tidy the family graves and make half-moon rice cakes steamed over pine needles.
24 – 26 de setembro de 2026Calculada
설날
Korean Lunar New Year is a three-day family holiday — tens of millions travel home to perform the ancestral rite, bow deeply to their elders in hanbok, eat a bowl of rice-cake soup and, by old custom, grow a year older.
6 – 8 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
강릉단오제
For weeks each spring, Gangneung on Korea’s east coast brews a sacred liquor, fetches its guardian god down from the mountain pass, marries him to a goddess, and then gives a week to shamanic rites, mask drama and the country’s largest open-air market.
26 de abril de 2027Calculada
연등회
As Buddha’s Birthday approaches, Korea lights up with lanterns — lotus lanterns strung over temple courtyards, a parade of giant glowing figures through the streets of Seoul, and a festival with more than a thousand years of history that UNESCO praises for dissolving social boundaries.
13 de maio de 2027Calculada
4 festas
On the second Sunday of October about two million people fill the streets of Belém, in the state of Pará, to follow a small wooden image of Our Lady of Nazareth — thousands of them straining to hold a 400-metre rope — in the largest Catholic event in Brazil.
11 de outubro de 2026Calculada
Carnaval do Rio de Janeiro
In the days before Lent, Rio de Janeiro holds what is considered the world’s largest carnival — two million people a day on the streets, and a contest of samba schools that parade through the Sambadrome with floats, drummers and thousands of dancers.
5 – 9 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
Bumba-meu-boi
Through June the arraiais of São Luís fill with embroidered oxen, drums and wooden clappers as almost a hundred bumba-meu-boi groups act out, in song and dance, the death and resurrection of an ox — a folk play born among the poor of colonial Brazil.
13 – 30 de junho de 2027Calculada
Festival Folclórico de Parintins
In a town in the Brazilian Amazon, two rival ox associations — blue Caprichoso and red Garantido — turn the story of the bumba-meu-boi into three nights of arena spectacle, with giant sets, drums, Amazonian legends and a whole town divided by colour.
25 – 27 de junho de 2027Estimada
3 festas
Carnaval de Negros y Blancos
In the Andean city of Pasto, the first week of January turns into a festival of equality — everyone is painted black on one day and powdered white the next, before a grand parade of towering handmade floats.
5 – 6 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
Carnaval de Barranquilla
For the four days before Lent, Colombia’s Caribbean port sets work aside for one of the world’s largest carnivals — a Battle of Flowers, a Great Parade of cumbia, congo and garabato dancers, an orchestra contest, and the burial of Joselito Carnaval.
6 – 9 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
Semana Santa de Popayán
Every night from Tuesday to Holy Saturday, the white colonial city of Popayán follows floats of eighteenth-century saints carried on the shoulders of its cargueros — processions held here since the 1550s and prepared all year.
23 – 27 de março de 2027Calculada
3 festas
መስቀል
At the end of the rainy season, Ethiopians commemorate the finding of the True Cross by lighting the demera — a great pyre decorated with yellow daisies — in Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square, where priests chant and dance before the patriarch sets it alight.
26 – 27 de setembro de 2026Calculada
ጥምቀት
Ethiopia’s Orthodox Epiphany celebrates the baptism of Christ — on the eve, priests carry each church’s tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, to a river or pool; at dawn the water is blessed and sprinkled over hundreds of thousands, before the arks return home in dancing processions.
18 – 19 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
እንቁጣጣሽ
The Ethiopian New Year arrives in September, as the rains end and hillsides turn yellow with adey abeba flowers — a day of church, family meals of injera and wat, and girls in new clothes going door to door with bouquets and the song “Abebaye hoy”.
12 de setembro de 2027Calculada
3 festas
Alasita
From 24 January, the streets of La Paz fill with stalls selling everything in miniature — houses, cars, diplomas, bundles of tiny banknotes — to be blessed and given away in the hope that the real thing will follow within the year, under the smiling eye of Ekeko, god of abundance.
24 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
Carnaval de Oruro
In the Bolivian highlands, some 28,000 dancers and 10,000 musicians dance their way along a four-kilometre route to the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Mineshaft — devils, llama herders and caporales in a carnival where Andean gods and Catholic saints have long shared the stage.
6 – 8 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
In a former Jesuit mission town in Bolivia’s Beni department, the Mojeño people honour St Ignatius with weeks of novenas, dances and fireworks — culminating in the dance of the macheteros, sun warriors crowned with great fans of feathers.
30 de julho – 2 de agosto de 2027Calculada
4 festas
Πατρινό Καρναβάλι
Greece’s largest carnival opens on St Anthony’s Day and builds for weeks — balls, a city-wide treasure hunt, a night parade — to a Sunday procession of satirical floats and tens of thousands of costumed revellers, ending with the burning of the Carnival King in the harbour.
17 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
Καθαρά Δευτέρα
The first day of Orthodox Lent is a public holiday in Greece, spent outdoors — families head out of town to fly kites, and share shellfish, fasting dishes and lagana, a flatbread baked only on this day.
15 de março de 2027Calculada
Πάσχα στην Κέρκυρα
Corfu celebrates Orthodox Easter with customs found nowhere else in Greece — brass bands playing funeral marches behind 33 epitaphs on Holy Friday, and on Holy Saturday morning a storm of clay pots flung from balconies, shattering in the streets to chase away bad luck.
30 de abril – 1 de maio de 2027Calculada
Ρουκετοπόλεμος
On the island of Chios, two rival parishes on facing hilltops mark Orthodox Easter night by firing tens of thousands of homemade rockets at each other’s church belfries — a “war” that neither side ever admits to losing.
1 de maio de 2027Calculada
4 festas
MassKara
Born in 1980 in a year of tragedy and a sugar-price crash, Bacolod’s “festival of smiles” fills the streets each October with dancers in grinning masks and feathered costumes, glowing Electric MassKara floats and a city determined to smile through hard times.
18 de outubro de 2026Estimada
Kalibo on Panay honours the Santo Niño with the festival often called the mother of all Philippine festivals — drumbeats, the dragging sadsad dance step, body paint and towering tribal-style costumes filling the streets for several days in January.
17 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
On the third Sunday of January, millions crowd Cebu City for the Philippines’ grandest festival — a prayer dance for the Santo Niño, the Holy Child, whose image Magellan’s expedition brought to Cebu in 1521, performed by street-dance contingents in dazzling costumes.
17 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
Pahiyas
Every 15 May the farming town of Lucban honours St Isidore the Labourer by dressing its houses in the harvest — fruit, vegetables, handicrafts and kiping, leaf-shaped rice wafers in every colour that can later be grilled or fried and eaten.
15 de maio de 2027Calculada
2 festas
Бүркіт той
In Mongolia’s far west, Kazakh eagle hunters in fur hats ride out with golden eagles on their arms to compete — calling their birds down from the hills to the glove, showing off their horsemanship and traditional dress on the steppe outside Ölgii.
3 – 4 de outubro de 2026Estimada
Наадам
Every July Mongolia stops for the “three games of men” — wrestling, cross-country horse racing ridden by children, and archery — opened in Ulaanbaatar’s stadium with parades of riders, dancers and the nine horse-tail banners of Genghis Khan.
11 – 13 de julho de 2027Calculada
3 festas
Carnaval de Binche
For the three days before Lent, the small Walloon town of Binche belongs to its Gilles — up to a thousand men in wax masks and wooden clogs who dance from dawn to drive away evil spirits and, crowned with ostrich plumes, throw oranges to the crowd.
7 – 9 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
On Trinity Sunday, Mons carries the shrine of its patron saint through town on a golden chariot that the crowd must push up a steep cobbled slope in one go — and then, on the Grand-Place, St George fights the dragon in the frantic half-hour combat called the Lumeçon.
22 – 23 de maio de 2027Calculada
Ommegang
On two summer evenings, Brussels relives the day in 1549 when it dazzled Emperor Charles V — some 1,400 people in Renaissance dress, horsemen, crossbowmen, stilt walkers and giants parade from the Sablon to a grand spectacle on the Grand-Place, with real nobles playing their ancestors.
julho de 2027Período aproximado
2 festas
Festa svetoga Vlaha
Dubrovnik has honoured its patron saint every February since, by tradition, the year 972 — releasing white doves on Candlemas, then carrying his relics along the Stradun in a procession of parish banners, folk costumes and old muskets fired in salute.
2 – 3 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
In the Croatian town of Sinj, horsemen in eighteenth-century dress gallop down a 160-metre track and try to spear a small iron ring hanging on a rope — a knights’ tournament held since the 1700s to remember a victory over an Ottoman army in 1715.
8 de agosto de 2027Calculada
2 festas
Festival de Barriletes Gigantes
On All Saints’ Day, the town of Sumpango gathers at the football field beside its cemetery for a contest of giant kites — vast, intricately patterned discs that teams spend months building, judged on their artistry and on how well they fly.
1 de novembro de 2026Calculada
Semana Santa
In Holy Week, Guatemala walks with its saints — purple-robed cucuruchos shoulder huge processional floats through the streets of Antigua and Guatemala City, over carpets of coloured sawdust and flowers that take hours to make and vanish as the procession passes.
21 – 28 de março de 2027Calculada
3 festas
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.
19 de setembro – 4 de outubro de 2026Calculada
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.
11 de novembro de 2026Calculada
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.
27 de novembro – 24 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
3 festas
On the last Tuesday of January, Lerwick switches off its streetlights and nearly a thousand costumed guizers carry blazing torches through the town behind a Viking galley — then throw them in and burn it.
26 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
Over the August bank holiday weekend around two million people fill the streets of west London for Europe’s largest street festival — Caribbean masquerade bands in feathers and jewels, steel pans, soca and calypso, and the sound systems of Notting Hill.
29 – 30 de agosto de 2027Calculada
On the first Saturday of September a village in the Cairngorms hosts the most prominent Highland games in the world — caber tossing, hill racing, Highland dancing and massed pipe bands in a park where the reigning monarch has been a regular guest since 1848.
4 de setembro de 2027Calculada
2 festas
Te Rā o Waitangi
New Zealand’s national day marks the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840 between the British Crown and Māori chiefs — commemorated with a dawn service, speeches, kapa haka and waka on the harbour at the Treaty Grounds, and at times with protest and debate.
6 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
When the star cluster Matariki — the Pleiades — reappears in the pre-dawn sky of midwinter, Māori mark the beginning of a new year by remembering the dead, feeding the stars and looking ahead. Since 2022 it has been a public holiday in New Zealand.
25 de junho de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
1 festa
On the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, Trinidad and Tobago takes to the streets — J’ouvert at daybreak in mud, oil and paint, then bands of masqueraders in colourful costumes, steelpan and soca — in a carnival born of French balls and the Canboulay of freed Africans.
8 – 9 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
2 festas
On the fourth Monday of November, farmers bring tonnes of braided onions and garlic into Bern, and the Swiss capital’s old town turns into a mix of farmers’ market and folk festival — from before dawn until a confetti battle in the afternoon.
23 de novembro de 2026Calculada
Basler Fasnacht
At exactly four o’clock on the Monday morning after Ash Wednesday, Basel switches off its lights and thousands of masked piccolo players and drummers march out behind glowing lanterns — the start of 72 hours of satire, confetti and music that UNESCO lists as world heritage.
15 – 17 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
2 festas
For nine days every October, more than 500 hot-air balloons lift off from a park on the edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in waves at sunrise — the largest ballooning event on Earth, where visitors can walk among the balloons as they inflate.
3 – 11 de outubro de 2026Calculada
Mardi Gras
For two weeks before Lent, the krewes of New Orleans roll their floats down St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street, and riders shower the crowds with beads, doubloons and cups — a carnival season that runs from Twelfth Night to the stroke of midnight on Fat Tuesday.
6 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
2 festas
تعامد الشمس على وجه رمسيس الثاني
Twice a year, on 22 February and 22 October, the rising sun shines straight through the Great Temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel and lights the statues in its innermost sanctuary — an alignment that engineers preserved when the whole temple was moved in the 1960s.
22 de outubro de 2026Calculada
شم النسيم
On the Monday after Coptic Easter, Egyptians of every faith head outdoors — to parks, gardens, the zoo and the banks of the Nile — to picnic on salted fish, green onions and lettuce and to colour eggs, in a spring festival believed to reach back to ancient Egypt.
3 de maio de 2027Calculada
2 festas
The Ga people of Accra remember a famine by laughing at it: after weeks in which drumming and noise are banned, chiefs sprinkle kpokpoi — steamed maize with palm oil — through the streets, and the drums return for “hooting at hunger”.
agosto – setembro de 2026Período aproximado
On the first Saturday of May, the two Asafo warrior companies of Winneba set out at dawn armed only with sticks and clubs, and race to bring back a live bushbuck for their chief — a sacrifice to the god Otu that, according to tradition, once demanded a human life.
1 de maio de 2027Calculada
1 festa
Kaapse Klopse
In the first days of January, some 20,000 minstrels in glittering matching uniforms, with parasols, banjos, trumpets and ghoema drums, march through Green Point in troupe after troupe — Cape Town’s “Second New Year”, rooted in the one day of freedom once given to enslaved people.
janeiro de 2027Período aproximado
1 festa
Grand Magal de Touba
On the 18th of Safar, millions of pilgrims of the Mouride brotherhood converge on the holy city of Touba to honour its founder, Sheikh Amadou Bamba, and the anniversary of his exile by the French — the largest celebration in Senegal and one of the most popular pilgrimages in the world.
22 – 23 de julho de 2027Estimada
2 festas
鹽水蜂炮
On the 14th and 15th nights of the first lunar month, the palanquin of Guan Di, the god of war, tours the streets of Yanshui, and from doorways along the way racks of bottle rockets are fired towards it — and into the crowd in helmets that follows.
19 – 20 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
平溪天燈節
Around the Lantern Festival, thousands of paper lanterns inscribed with wishes rise into the night sky over the hill town of Pingxi — a custom that began as a signal to villagers hiding from bandits that it was safe to come home.
20 de fevereiro de 2027Calculada
2 festas
Lá Fhéile Pádraig
On 17 March Ireland honours its patron saint with parades, traditional music and a sea of green and shamrocks — led by the national parade through Dublin, and echoed in Irish communities and green-lit landmarks around the world.
17 de março de 2027Calculada
Aonach an Phoic
Every August a wild goat is brought down from the mountains to the Kerry town of Killorglin, crowned King Puck by a local schoolgirl, and presides over three days of horse and cattle fairs, music and late nights before returning home to the hills.
10 – 12 de agosto de 2027Calculada
2 festas
Luciadagen
On 13 December, processions in white gowns walk into schools, churches and town squares across Sweden, led by a Lucia wearing a crown of candles and singing of light returning to the dark — followed by saffron buns and mulled wine.
13 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
Midsommar
On a Friday in late June, Swedes leave the cities for the countryside, pick flowers for wreaths, raise a pole clad in leaves and dance around it — then sit down to herring, new potatoes and strawberry cake as the light lingers late into the night.
25 – 26 de junho de 2027Calculada
2 festas
For ten days in February, Québec City celebrates winter with Bonhomme, a seven-foot snowman in a red tuque and arrow sash who holds the keys to the city, ice palaces, night parades with long red trumpets — and a snow bath in swimsuits.
5 – 14 de fevereiro de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
Every July, Calgary dresses in western wear for “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” — ten days of rodeo and chuckwagon racing, a parade, midway rides and pancake breakfasts, with more than a million visitors.
9 – 18 de julho de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
2 festas
Festas de Lisboa (Santo António)
On the night of 12 June, Lisbon’s neighbourhoods parade down the Avenida da Liberdade in the Marchas Populares, while the old quarters, hung with garlands and coloured globes, fill with the smell of grilled sardines and sweet basil for Santo António.
12 – 13 de junho de 2027Calculada
On the night of 23 June, Porto pours into its streets for its most beloved saint — dancing, grilled sardines, bonfires and a playful tap on the head with a plastic hammer — until fireworks light the sky at midnight and revellers walk to the sea to wait for sunrise.
23 – 24 de junho de 2027Calculada
2 festas
On 18 and 19 September Chile celebrates its national holidays — the Dieciocho — with flags on every building, cueca dancing and barbecues in the fondas, a Te Deum in Santiago and a great military parade, in what can stretch into a week of celebration.
18 – 19 de setembro de 2026Calculada
Every July, a desert village of about 800 people in northern Chile receives between 250,000 and 500,000 pilgrims, as religious dance societies — devils, Incas, miners and gypsies — dance day and night for the Virgen del Carmen of La Tirana.
15 – 16 de julho de 2027Calculada
1 festa
On one night of the year, the two rival neighbourhoods of a central Cuban town unveil what they have built in secret for months — towering light displays, floats with living statues and thousands of rockets — in the Parrandas that began in Remedios in 1820.
24 – 25 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
2 festas
Sámi beassášmárkanat
At Easter the Sámi village of Kautokeino in Finnmark fills with reindeer races, duodji handicraft markets, theatre and concerts, crowned by the Sámi Grand Prix of joik and song — continuing the old tradition of gathering before the reindeer move to the coast.
20 – 29 de março de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
On 17 May, Norway’s National Day, children’s parades with flags, banners and marching bands wind through every community, people in the traditional bunad shout “Hurra!”, and in Oslo the royal family waves from the palace balcony — followed by ice cream and hot dogs.
17 de maio de 2027Calculada
2 festas
Konkurs Szopek Krakowskich
On the first Thursday of December, hundreds of makers carry their szopki — nativity scenes shaped like Kraków’s churches, towers and cloth hall, glittering with foil and coloured paper — to the steps of the Mickiewicz monument on the Main Market Square to be judged.
3 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
Pochód Lajkonika
On the first Thursday after Corpus Christi, a bearded rider in a red Tatar costume, with a wooden horse around his waist, dances through Kraków with a band and an escort of “Tatars”, tapping passers-by with his mace for luck before toasting the city with the mayor.
3 de junho de 2027Calculada
2 festas
Сурова
On the nights of 13 and 14 January, masked survakari in fur, horns and heavy bells gather around fires in the villages of the Pernik region, then go from house to house marrying young couples in jest and wishing health for the new year — a masquerade listed by UNESCO.
13 – 14 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
Празник на розата
At the start of June, the Rose Valley around Kazanlak celebrates the Bulgarian oil rose — pickers in folk costume gather blossoms in the gardens, rose oil is distilled for guests, and a Rose Queen leads a carnival procession of thousands through town.
6 de junho de 2027Calculada
1 festa
Վարդավառ
Fourteen weeks after Easter, Armenians of every age take to the streets with buckets, bottles and water guns and soak anyone they meet — a festival rooted in the worship of Astghik, goddess of water and love, and kept by the church as the Feast of the Transfiguration.
4 de julho de 2027Calculada
1 festa
On the Balinese New Year the whole island stops for 24 hours — no fire or lights, no work, no travel, no entertainment, and even the airport closes — after a night in which villages parade giant demon figures, the ogoh-ogoh, through the streets to drive evil away.
8 de março de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
2 festas
Sydney New Year's Eve
As one of the first big cities to reach midnight, Sydney sends fireworks off the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and barges across the harbour, watched by an estimated 1.5 million people — after an evening that opens with a smoking ceremony and a Welcome to Country.
31 de dezembro de 2026Calculada
On 25 April Australians gather at war memorials in the half-light before dawn — the hour of the Gallipoli landing in 1915 — for the Last Post and a silence, before veterans march through the cities and old comrades meet over a game of two-up.
25 de abril de 2027Calculada
2 festas
On the weekend nearest 10 November, Argentina’s Day of Tradition, San Antonio de Areco — the national capital of tradition — honours the gaucho with campfire music, ring races and roping contests, and a parade of some 2,000 riders and 60 herds of horses through the town.
7 – 8 de novembro de 2026Estimada
Every March Mendoza celebrates the grape harvest with a night parade of illuminated floats from which the harvest queens throw fruit to the crowd, a morning procession of ox carts and gauchos, and a spectacle of more than a thousand dancers in an open-air theatre that ends with the crowning of the national queen.
5 de março de 2027Estimada
1 festa
Esala Perahera
For ten nights the Sacred Tooth Relic’s casket is paraded through Kandy on the back of a great tusker, preceded by whip-crackers and fire dancers, Kandyan drummers and elephants in glittering caparisons, until the festival ends with a water-cutting ceremony in the Mahaweli River.
julho – agosto de 2027Período aproximado
1 festa
Each January the faithful of Benin’s Vodun convents come out into the streets and onto the beach of Ouidah — Zangbétɔ night guardians in straw, Egungun masquerades and Vodun dancers — for a festival that ends in a great ceremony where priests of Fá announce the sign for the year.
2 – 9 de janeiro de 2027Anunciada oficialmente
1 festa
Diablada Pillareña
From 1 to 6 January, troupes of devils from the neighbourhoods of Píllaro dance through the town in masks of painted papier-mâché — a tradition said to have begun as a protest against colonial masters and preachers.
1 – 6 de janeiro de 2027Calculada
1 festa
தைப்பூசம் (Thaipusam)
After 48 days of preparation, barefoot devotees of Murugan bathe in the river and bring their vows to his shrine at the Batu Caves — pots of milk, or kavadis up to two metres tall decked with peacock feathers — to drumming and chanting that carries some into trance.
janeiro – fevereiro de 2027Período aproximado
1 festa
পহেলা বৈশাখ
At dawn on 14 April Dhaka welcomes the Bengali New Year with Tagore’s “Esho he Boishakh” sung under the banyan tree at Ramna, then follows a procession of giant masks and floats — one for evil, one for courage, one for peace — made by the students of the Faculty of Fine Arts.
14 de abril de 2027Calculada
1 festa
Ọdún Ọ̀ṣun Òṣogbo
After twelve days of rites — the cleansing of the town, the lighting of a sixteen-point lamp, the blessing of the crowns of past kings — Osogbo follows the Arugba, a young woman carrying a sacred calabash, into the Osun Sacred Grove to renew the town’s ancient pact with the river goddess.
julho – agosto de 2027Período aproximado
1 festa
Each February Montevideo’s candombe troupes parade through Barrio Sur and Palermo — flags, moons and stars, dancers, the old healer and the colonial housekeeper, broom-bearers sweeping away bad luck, and at the back at least thirty-six drums beating out the city’s African heritage.
fevereiro de 2027Período aproximado
1 festa
Close to Independence Day, about a hundred tribes from across Papua New Guinea gather in Goroka for the country’s biggest sing-sing, with painted faces, music and dance — and the ghostly Asaro Mudmen in their clay masks.
16 de setembro de 2027Estimada
1 festa
Nanggol
When the yams are harvested, the men of southern Pentecost build towers of freshly cut wood lashed with vines, and one after another dive from their platforms with vines tied to their ankles, trying to brush the tilled earth with their shoulders — the higher the dive, the better the harvest.
abril – junho de 2027Período aproximado
1 festa
At 6 pm on 30 April, students place a white cap on the head of Helsinki’s mermaid statue, and Finland’s biggest carnival begins — caps and overalls in the streets, sima and sparkling wine, and on 1 May picnics in the parks from early morning.
30 de abril – 1 de maio de 2027Calculada
1 festa
المهرجان الدولي للصحراء بدوز
For four days at the end of December, Douz celebrates the life of the desert — camel races and fantasias on a vast sandy square ringed with Bedouin tents, hunting with sloughi hounds, Bedouin weddings, folk poetry and, at night, music and dance from across the Arab world and beyond.
dezembro de 2026Período aproximado
1 festa
In Makunduchi on Zanzibar, the New Year of an ancient solar calendar is welcomed with a ritual battle, followed by the burning of a hut — and the direction its smoke takes tells the village what the coming year will bring.
julho – agosto de 2027Período aproximado
