Six of the best city festivals around the world

published 28 October 2018

Paris: Bastille Day

We can think of quite a few stupendous fireworks festivals – Madeira has a month-long pyro-musical extravaganza in June and exploding rockets litter the skies over Japan throughout the year – but for pure pomp and circumstance, Bastille Day in Paris is not to be missed.

Every July 14 for la fête nationale, thousands of soldiers parade down the Champs-Elysées with trumpets, bugles and drums, celebrating the day in 1789 that the Bastille was stormed, their country’s move towards democracy – albeit a bloody one. Parties are held throughout the city, including the notorious Bals des Pompiers (Fireman’s Balls) and, come 11pm, fireworks shoot off the Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro gardens to dazzling effect.

Venice: Carnevale di maschere

This Baroque spectacle was so shocking in its decadence (think Casanova, courtesans and illicit mingling of classes and genders behind painted masks) that it was banned by Napoleon the moment he invaded Venice in 1797. After a few stops and starts, Carnevale di Venezia was reinstated in 1979.

It now runs from mid February to Shrove Tuesday every year and opens with the Flight of the Angel, in which a beautiful woman leaps (attached to a cable), scattering confetti, from the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco towards a crowd of some 20,000 revellers.

Hong Kong: Chinese New Year

If New Year’s Eve in Britain is a damp squib, a person who owns property in Hong Kong knows that, come January/February, the vibrant, week-long Chinese New Year will set things right. Next year, festivities marking the start of the Year of the Pig begin on February 5.

No doubt neon swine will light up the façades of the city’s high rises, with lasers, LED lights and musical displays, best viewed in the evenings from a junk in Victoria Harbour. Visitors can also hike along the Dragon’s Back Trail (it’s good luck), sup on steamed buns and marvel at the multi-coloured lanterns on every street.

USA: Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta

Floating across the expanse of a blue New Mexico sky, the 500 or so hot-air balloons that take part in the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta every October, the largest event of its kind in the world, drift as peacefully as soft clouds, albeit in rainbow hues.

More than 100,000 spectators flock to the launch field throughout the nine-day event (usually held in October) to enjoy the balloons as well as other entertainments including laser light shows, fireworks and, obviously, chainsaw-carving demonstrations. The locals simply set up camp in their backyard and look up.

For an extra dose of the surreal, the city of Albuquerque, founded as a Spanish colony in 1706 but with a strong Native American influence, sits in the middle of a desert and contains properties such as this one:

Switzerland: The Snow Polo World Cup

Termed ‘a crazy adventure’ by its co-founder, hotelier Reto Gaudenzi, and, by others, ‘a spectacle not a sport’, the Snow Polo World Cup in St Moritz may not draw the same kind of crowds as, say, the Rio Carnival, but it wins points for sheer surrealism. Every January, 12,000 people turn up to watch eight polo players battle it out on a 44m-deep frozen lake 1,850m up in the mountains for the Cartier Trophy.

Next year will be the 35th iteration (January 25–27, 2019). Back in 1985, it was the first ever polo tournament on snow; it’s still the world’s only high-goal tournament on snow, but its popularity has spurred on similar events in Aspen, Cortina in Italy and China’s Tianjin. ‘A little bit of craziness must be behind every good idea,’ says Mr Gaudenzi.

With 300 days of sunshine a year, ‘St Moritz is the place where everybody wants to go’ – and it's also where plenty of people want to live.

India: Holi, the world’s most colourful festival

Glorious spring and its bounty is celebrated all over the world, but nowhere matches India for kaleidoscopic colour. Every March, on the first day after the Full Moon, after a night of dancing around bonfires to mark the burning of the demoness Holika, revellers throughout India throw coloured powder (gulal) all over the place and spray each other with water (March 21–22, 2019).

Holi, in honour of Hindu god Vishnu, is a celebration of good’s triumph over evil and is seen as a symbolic day for making a fresh start. Everyone who takes part is submerged in a tapestry of colours and people often remark that on this day all caste systems and nationalities disappear – everyone is equal. In Goa, Holi is ramped up as part of a more extensive, weeks-long spring festival – Shigmo, including folk and warrior dancing and Hindu New Year.

Dip in and out of the action from Assagao village, where this contemporary ‘levitating house’ shows a mix of Japanese, colonial and Portuguese influences.

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.