Best Festivals Around the World
Settle it: two at a time →Festivals around the world that justify booking a flight rather than just a ticket, spanning religious observances with centuries behind them and music events built in the last few decades. Entries qualify on scale, distinctiveness, and whether the experience can be reproduced anywhere else, whether the setting is a Niemeyer-designed parade stadium, a Somerset dairy farm, or a Nevada dry lake bed. The entries near the top pair mass participation with a tradition deep enough that locals, not visitors, still set the terms.
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How the opening order was chosen
The opening order is the order I added the items in. Every ballot moves the ranking from there.
A reasonable ordering weighs how many people take part against how much the event depends on its specific place and lineage. That is where the top gets contentious: Rio's blocos are unmatched for sheer scale, while Holi and Day of the Dead carry centuries of meaning no ticketed music festival can manufacture, which leaves Coachella's high placement resting on influence rather than depth.
Global Ranking
What began in 1986 as an eight-foot wooden figure burned on San Francisco's Baker Beach moved to Nevada's Black Rock Desert in 1990 and became a temporary city of tens of thousands. Ice is close to the only thing sold on site, and the Temple, added in 2000, burns the night after the Man.
Guinness World Records lists Rio's as the largest carnival anywhere, with hundreds of free street blocos running alongside the ticketed parades. Samba schools compete down the 700 metre Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí, an Oscar Niemeyer design opened in 1984, judged on drums, floats, and theme.
Launched in October 1999 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, Coachella lost so much money that no festival happened in 2000. Since 2012 it has run as two identical three-day weekends, and its large-scale art and reunion bookings set a template other American festivals copied.
UNESCO added Mexico's indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2008. Households build ofrendas with marigolds, candles, and food for 1 and 2 November, timed to the close of the maize cycle, then keep vigil in the cemeteries overnight.
Five days long, the festival peaks with Lakshmi Puja on the new moon of Kartika, when rows of oil lamps and fireworks mark the victory of light over dark. Ayodhya's Deepotsav has broken its own Guinness lamp-lighting record repeatedly, clearing 2.5 million diyas beside the Sarayu.
Born in 1947 when eight uninvited theatre companies gatecrashed the new official festival, the Fringe still refuses to curate, which means anyone can perform, thousands do, and most go home having lost money in a city whose August rents punish artists and audiences alike.
The first Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival in September 1970 charged one pound and drew about 1,500 people; Worthy Farm now holds around 210,000. Tickets for 2025 sold out in 35 minutes, and the site takes a fallow year roughly every five to let the dairy land recover.
A full district of palaces and towers cut from Songhua River ice, lit from inside and rebuilt from scratch every winter. No other entry here depends on cold this deep, and that is also the price of admission: the cold that keeps the ice standing is miserable to walk around in, and by spring the whole thing is a puddle.
Falling on the full moon of Phalguna, Holi opens with the Holika Dahan bonfire and turns to thrown colour the following morning. Braj towns near Mathura stretch it across a week, including Barsana's Lathmar Holi, where women drive men from neighbouring Nandgaon back with bamboo sticks.
Burning Man builds a temporary city for tens of thousands; the Kumbh builds one for tens of millions, complete with pontoon bridges, its own police posts, and naga sadhus leading the dawn processions into the river. It rotates between four riverside cities on a cycle set by planetary positions. The crowds are the point and also the danger, as the fatal crush at Prayagraj in 2025 showed.
Buñol has staged its hour-long tomato fight on the last Wednesday of August since 1945, when a scuffle at a parade spilled into a vegetable stall. Trucks tip in well over 100 tonnes of overripe fruit, and ticketing has capped the crowd at 20,000 since 2013, down from unticketed crowds past 40,000.
New Orleans krewe culture dates to 1857, when the Mistick Krewe of Comus staged the first themed torchlit procession. Rex followed in 1872 and fixed purple, green, and gold as Carnival's colours, while Zulu, rolling since 1909, throws the hand-decorated coconuts people queue hours for.
Munich has held Oktoberfest on the Theresienwiese since October 1810, when the meadow hosted the wedding celebration of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese. The 2024 edition drew about 6.7 million visitors, and only breweries based within the city limits may pour inside the tents.
Thai New Year in mid-April, when the whole country becomes a water fight and Chiang Mai's moat serves as the ammunition supply; temples still open it the old way, with scented water poured over Buddha images and elders' hands. La Tomatina lasts an hour, this runs for days, and the holiday's road toll is grim enough that Thais call it the seven dangerous days.
Cathedral-scale stage sets take months to build, which is why the fire that levelled the main stage two days before gates opened in 2025 should have ended that edition; a replacement went up and the shows ran anyway. Coachella has the bookings, Tomorrowland has the fantasy staging. The ticket queue is the real fight, and Boom offers nothing once the music stops.
