Rio Carnival

Where: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
When: February/March - from the Friday of Carnival weekend to Shrove Tuesday
Lasts: 5 days
More: www.rio-carnival.net

The Rio Carnival (Carnaval in Portuguese), a five-day extravaganza of colour, excess and festivity, is probably the most famous street party in the world. The fact that it takes place during the hottest month of the Rio summer, adds an extremely heady atmosphere to an already passionate event.

Carnaval takes place in the last days (and nights) before Ash Wednesday. In the UK we celebrate this with pancakes but in Rio its drums, dancing, singing and people dressed up in sometimes bizarre but always colourful costumes. This is their way of saying farewell to the pleasures of the flesh – for Lent.

The Parade of Schools takes place in the Sambodromo – a long, straight custom-built stadium, with the best Samba schools forming the dazzling parade of feathered, sequined and sometimes very sexy dancers. The parade starts at 8pm but you must have tickets to get in. Be quick off the mark as they are highly sought after.

The best vantage points are Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon where gaudy lights, beach bars and food stalls lead the way offering refreshment before rejoining the heady rythms of the party. 

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Mardi Gras

Where: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
When: February or March
Lasts: Around 6 weeks

Mardi Gras, originially brought to Louisiana by French settlers, means ‘Fat Tuesday’ in French. The event comprises a motley mix of parades, parties, secret masked balls that all end the day before Ash Wednesday. The parades are organized by Carnival krewes who arrange for float riders to toss strings, beads, doubloons (dollar-sized coins with krewe logo), decorated plastic cups and cheap toys into the madding crowds and the streets are alive with loud live jazz, R&B, funk and wild brass band music. Dancing in the street is simply unavoidable.

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Trinidad Carnival

Where: Port of Spain and other smaller towns, Trinidad and Tobago
When: February or March
Lasts: 2 days

Everyone in Trinidad takes part in this festival and it would be hard not to as the festivities take over the entire country. Indeed in the run up, everyday life if full of pre-Carnival activities including fund-raising parties and calypso competitions run by local businesses. The main sounds of the event are calypso and steelpan and the ritual pageant comprises the King and Queen contest, Panorama, Dimanche Gras, J’Ouvert and the Parade of the Bands culminating in a stunning display and finally concluding on a quiet note on Ash Wednesday.

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Las Fallas

Where: Valencia, Spain
When: March 12-19
Lasts: 7 days
More: www.fallas.com

If the bangs and crashes from fireworks each November 5th set your nerves jangling, then Valencia in March isn’t your ideal destination. For a week in spring, the Spanish turn the volume up to eleven, and raise unbearable noise into an art form.

With roots in the pagan celebrations of the spring equinox, this festival celebrates the passing of winter with a party that is literally hot stuff. This includes setting off fire-crackers, rockets, massive bonfires on every street corner. Sangria flows and everyone parties hard while enjoying processions galore that range from historical to hysterical.

Each day at 2.00pm during the fiesta of Las Fallas, thousands gather in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento for the Mascletà firecrackers creating  a ground-shaking, heart-stopping, knee-weakening din. Gunpowder rockets and bombs assault every sense into submission, rising through clouds of thick cordite smoke to a stunning crescendo of sound. And then it’s all over. The crowd roars approval, and rush forward to congratulate the brave pyrotechnicians.

The Mascletà fireworks are a daily part of week-long festival in which four hundred enormous effigies are placed around the town each on its own elaborate firecracker-filled cardboard and papier-mâché artistic monument. Breathtakingly intricate, beautiful, grotesque – they often have a satirical or political message. On the final day, amid more fireworks and tremendous cheering, all of these behemoths are consigned to the flames.

One sculpture spared this fate is that of the Virgen de los Desamperados. The religious heart of the Fallas festival, her shrine in the plaza named for her is the destination for thousands of processing Falleras, ladies of Spain in their beautiful silk crinolines and mantillas. The myriad flowers they tearfully offer are used to construct an aromatic mantle for the  towering Virgin. As unmissable as it is unforgettable.

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Queen’s Day

Where: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
When, April 30th unless this falls on a Sunday in which case it is held on 29th
Lasts: 1 day

Queen’s day, generally famed as the world’s biggest street party, is a celebration of the birthday of the reigning monarch Queen Beatrix. But this is Amsterdam and the Dutch really know how to crank up a party – think sleaze, drugs and alcohol binging. Nearly two million people enjoy a right royal rave-up!

The party starts around midnight the night before and lasts through the night and should officially end an hour before sunrise. The next day huge outdoor concerts take up the slack on Dam Square and Museumplein. Amsterdam is liberal at any time, but on this day is the one day of the year when police do not interfere with anything no matter how outrageous. Where do they draw the line?

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Glastonbury Festival

Where: Glastonbury, England
When: End of June
Lasts: 3 days

This huge music festival, often considered the finest, attracts hundreds of thousands of free spirits a year. Glastonbury’s strong ‘hippy’ vibe inevitably involves drugs, but it also promotes a laidback, peaceful and happy atmosphere.

The festival, which regularly features some of the biggest music artists in the world, takes place in a huge farm (with the animals temporarily evacuated) in southwest England, and is an incredible experience. That may be down to the music, it may be down to the drugs, it may be down to the fact that the typical Glastonbury patron is far friendlier than your average festival goer, but it’s most likely a wonderful combination of all of the above. 

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Fiesta de San Fermin

Where:, Pamplona, Spain
When: July 6-14
Lasts: 9 days

Every July, this Spanish town lets its hair down and throws itself into a drunken stupour fuelled by beer and sangria in time for the ‘encierro’ - the terrifying and totally wreckless bull run. The partying is as intensive as it gets, and if the prospect of getting run over by a bull doesn't get the adrenalin rushing, absolutely nothing will.

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Love Parade

Where: Berlin, Germany
When: Second or third Saturday in July
Lasts: 1 day

This is one of the world's largest free music festivals and everywhere you look, people are quite literally, unashamedly loved up sometimes ruining the flora at Tiergarten park. Not a good place for prudes, and the blame for this lies firmly with a local DJ, Dr Motte who, in 1989, just four months after the Berlin wall came down, got together a posse of 100 ravers to celebrate his birthday. They passed the time dancing under the banner 'Friede, Freude, Eirkuchen' - peace, joy, pancakes. The next year, two thousand people danced all day and night under the Love Parade flag with the banner 'The Future is Ours'. When reunification of Berlin became official 6 months later, this became the official demonstration and six thousand ravers marched throughout the city with the motto 'Worldwide Party People Weekend'.

Its worth noting that the Berlin authorities are trying hard to ban this parade because of the devastation it causes so you had better get there quick before this happens.

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Oktoberfest

Where: Munich, Germany
When: Mid-September to early October
Lasts: 2 weeks

It started as a wedding party for local royals but today The Munich beer festival is officially the world's largest public festival and everyone is here for the beer. In essence it celebrates Bavarian life and you'll see participants dressed in lederhosen, decorated carriages and horse-drawn floats. In practice seven million visitors down over four million litres of beer.

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Burning Man

Where: Black Rock City, Nevada, USA
When: The week before Labor Day (first Monday in September)
Lasts: 8 days

This bizarre event takes place on an ancient lakebed, known as the playa and is dedicated to ‘radical self-reliance, radical self-expression and art’. This translates into a couple of thousand anarchists, deviants, freaky performers and mad scientists giving their all to be as radical as they can. Past ‘art’ features included a motorized magic-carpet, cars turned into giant spiders, a nudist miniature golf course, gigantic ducks, fire-breathing thistles and even serpents and balsa wood temples have emerged from the playa! No matter what you turn up in, you are guaranteed not to be the wierdest kid in the classroom. And its is quite normal for revellers to turn up in electroluminescent wired body suits, or in their birthday suit painted in luminous paint.

The highlight of the weeks is, unsurpringly, the burning of a fifty-foot tall effigy of a man made of wood and neon and choc full of fireworks.

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Fantasy Fest

Where: Key West, Florida, USA
When: From the penultimate Friday to the last Sunday in October
Lasts: 10 days

If you love dressing up in outlandish fancy-dress costumes, then this party is for you. Every October, Key West's Fantasy Zone, the last in the series of islands that pan out from Florida, is host to the Fantasy Fest. Music and rum flow throughout and ends with an eye-catchingly camp costumed parade. It all starts with the Goombay Celebrations with Caribbean tastes and sights. Then there's the Headdress ball on the Tuesday, where every type of topper, sometimes 10 feet tall, are donned. On Wednesday there's a beach party and the Pet Masquerade and Parade. On Thursday there's the flamboyant costume competition - Pretenders in Paradise and a notorious Toga Party. On Friday the Caribbean street fair creates a tropical marketplace followed by the Megastore Masquerade March. Surely that's enough fantasy for anyone?

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27 February 2009