The festival calendar
Ecuador burns effigies of the old year in the street at midnight, sends thousands of hooded penitents through the Old Town on Good Friday, and drinks a hot purple corn drink with bread shaped like swaddled babies to remember the dead. If your dates can move by a few days, these are the weeks worth moving them for.
The four that would change our own travel dates
- Fiestas de Quito — the first week of December. The city at its loudest and most itself.
- Semana Santa — March or April. One of the great religious processions in the Americas.
- Día de los Difuntos — the start of November. Quieter, older, and deeply moving.
- New Year's Eve — effigies burning on every corner. Unforgettable and not restful.
- Carnival and Holy Week move every year. Check the dates for yours before booking.
December · Fiestas de Quito
The founding of the Spanish city is celebrated across the first week of December, and it is the best week of the year to be here.
What happens: open-air concerts in the plazas, parades and comparsas, neighbourhood parties, and chivas — open-sided wooden buses packed with people and a brass band, circling the Old Town late into the night, everyone aboard with a drink and nobody in a hurry. The city stops behaving like a heritage site and starts behaving like a city.
Practically: book months ahead, expect noise until very late, and expect street closures. If you want the quiet colonial Quito of the photographs, this is the wrong week. If you want to understand the place, it is the only one.
31 December · Año Viejo
The strangest and the best.
Through late December, stalls appear selling monigotes — life-sized papier-mâché figures, often satirical portraits of politicians, footballers and cartoon characters. Families buy or build one, stuff it with old clothes, and at midnight burn it in the street. The figure is the year that is ending, and everything in it you would rather not carry forward.
Some families write a testamento, a mock will listing the year's grievances, and read it aloud before lighting the match. And you will meet viudas — men dressed as widows of the dying year — dancing in the road and stopping cars for coins.
By half past midnight the whole city smells of smoke and gunpowder. Chaotic, warm, faintly pagan, and nothing like a European New Year.
February or March · Carnaval
The dates move. In Quito it is water balloons and foam, cheerfully aimed at anyone in range, visitors very much included. Take it in good humour, keep your phone in a bag, and wear nothing you mind soaking.
The real centre of it is Guaranda, a few hours south, where Carnival is a serious multi-day affair. Many Quiteños leave for the long weekend, which makes the city itself unusually calm.
March or April · Semana Santa
The most extraordinary thing on this calendar.
On Good Friday the Jesús del Gran Poder procession moves through the Old Town: tens of thousands of people, and among them the cucuruchos — penitents in purple robes and tall conical hoods, some barefoot, some carrying crosses, some in chains. Alongside them walk the Verónicas, women in purple with veiled faces. It lasts hours and the crowd is largely silent.
It is an act of devotion rather than a performance for visitors, and that is worth saying plainly: watch respectfully, keep out of the way, and think before photographing individual penitents. Many are fulfilling private promises.
This is also the fortnight of fanesca, a dense soup of twelve grains and beans with salt cod, made only now, every family certain their version is the correct one. See what to eat in Quito.
June · Inti Raymi
The Andean sun festival, timed to the June solstice and far older than anything Spanish on this list. It is strongest in the northern highlands around Otavalo and Cotacachi, where communities dance for days in rotating groups, with masks, stamping circular rhythms and a great deal of chicha.
In Quito you will see it folded into the feast of San Juan and Corpus Christi. If you are here in late June and can reach Otavalo, do — see the Otavalo guide.
10 August · Primer Grito de la Independencia
Quito claims the first cry for independence in Spanish America, in 1809 — hence Luz de América. Parades, ceremonies, military bands, a national holiday. Pleasant rather than unmissable, but it explains most of the street names you have been walking past.
September and November · La Mama Negra
In Latacunga, two hours south, one of the more peculiar festivals in the Andes: a parade led by a figure representing a Black Virgin, on horseback, blessing the crowd with milk, surrounded by characters from a syncretic tradition mixing Indigenous, African and Spanish elements over four centuries.
It is complicated, and modern visitors have complicated reactions to it. We mention it because it is a significant Ecuadorian festival you may encounter, not to tell you what to make of it.
2 November · Día de los Difuntos
The quietest one, and the one that stays with people.
Families go to cemeteries with flowers and food and spend the day there, eating beside the graves and talking to the dead. Everyone drinks colada morada — hot, thick, purple, made from black corn flour with blackberries, naranjilla and spices — with guaguas de pan, bread shaped and painted as swaddled infants.
The tradition long predates the Spanish arrival, and the bread infants are widely understood as descended from pre-Columbian funerary practice, with the church built on top of it. It is not sombre and it is not a party. It is something in between that most northern cultures no longer have a word for.
If you are here at the start of November, this is not optional.
How to use the calendar
- Book far earlier for December and Holy Week. These are the weeks the city fills.
- Moveable feasts move. Carnival and Semana Santa shift every year; confirm before you fix flights.
- Public holidays close things. Museums, churches and offices shut, and long weekends empty the city.
- A day of flexibility is worth a lot. Shifting a stopover by 48 hours can be the difference between an ordinary Tuesday and a chiva at midnight.
The weather side of the same question is in when to visit Quito, and if the islands are driving your dates, start with when to visit the Galápagos.
What we do here
We will tell you what is on during your dates, including the small neighbourhood things that never reach a listings site — which in San Blas happen fairly often. During Fiestas de Quito and Semana Santa we will tell you where to stand and when to be there, which for a procession matters more than any ticket.
Send us your dates and we will tell you what you have walked into
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house on the quiet edge of the Old Town — close enough to walk to a procession, far enough to sleep afterwards. Book direct for our lowest rate.
See our best dealsTake the calendar with you
Useful at the planning stage, when the dates are still movable.
