8 Strangest Festivals Around the World

Every country keeps one tradition it would rather not explain at the border. Spain has La Tomatina, the tomato fight in Buñol that runs for exactly one hour on the last Wednesday of August, has been capped at 20,000 ticketed participants since 2013, and once got through an estimated 145,000 kilograms of tomatoes in a single morning. You already know that one. It has a merch stall.

The eight below sit further down the page. All real, all annual, all still running. We checked the dates, the founding years and the one written rule in each case that makes the thing sound invented. Without further ado.

1. Battle of the Oranges, Ivrea, Italy

Ivrea sits in Piedmont, north of Turin, and for three afternoons every February the town pelts itself with fruit. The 2026 battle ran from 15 to 17 February. Nine teams on foot defend the squares against nine riding horse-drawn carts, the carts standing in for a tyrant’s soldiers in a re-enactment of the medieval revolt that made Ivrea a free commune. The ammunition is surplus citrus trucked up from southern Italy.

Why it’s weird: the safety equipment is a hat. Spectators wear the red Phrygian cap, the floppy one the French Revolution borrowed, and it declares you a non-combatant. Nobody throws at a red cap. Take it off and you have volunteered. The carnival runs its own site.

2. Cheese-Rolling on Cooper’s Hill, Gloucestershire

The slope runs about 180 metres at a gradient near 50 percent, which makes it less a hill than a decision. The earliest written mention is in Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 9 June 1836. The race moved to the spring bank holiday Monday in 1967. A seven to nine pound wheel of Double Gloucester gets a one second head start, which is more warning than Indiana Jones got.

Nobody has officially organised it since 2010. It happens anyway. Chris Anderson retired in 2022 holding 23 downhill wins, and in 2026 every men’s downhill went to a runner from outside Britain for the first time on record. Why it’s weird: the cheese outruns everyone and is never caught, so the rule is that the first human body over the line wins it. In 2013 a foam replica stood in on safety grounds. Somebody caught that.

3. Cheung Chau Bun Festival, Hong Kong

Cheung Chau has no cars and no bridge. The ferry from Central Pier 5 is the only way on. The festival lands on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, and the 2026 run went from 21 to 25 May. Three bamboo towers around sixty feet tall go up outside the Pak Tai Temple, studded with red-stamped Ping On buns from a supplier who bakes more than 60,000 of them.

The scramble uses a separate steel tower, where twelve vetted climbers get three minutes and buns higher up score more, a structure with more engineering behind it than anything in our roundup of the strangest LEGO sets. A bamboo tower gave way under roughly 200 climbers in 1978, injuring more than a hundred people and getting the race banned for 27 years before it returned in 2005 with steel scaffolding and plastic buns. Why it’s weird: the island goes vegetarian for three days, seafood restaurants included, and the local McDonald’s sells a mushroom burger.

4. El Colacho, Castrillo de Murcia, Spain

Since 1620, during the octave of Corpus Christi, men from this village in the province of Burgos have dressed in red and yellow devil suits, picked up whips and oversized castanets, and run through the streets. In 2026 the leap fell on 7 June. Mattresses go down in the road. Babies born within the previous twelve months are laid on them, and the devils jump.

The leap is held to carry off original sin and shield the child from illness. Castile and León listed the event as a Festival of Tourist Interest in 1978, and Pope Benedict XVI later asked Spanish clergy to keep their distance on the grounds that baptism already covers the theology. Why it’s weird: eligibility closes hard at twelve months, so a baby born a fortnight late waits for a younger sibling.

5. Wife Carrying World Championship, Sonkajärvi, Finland

Eastern Finland hosts this every July, and the 2026 edition ran on 2 and 3 July. The origin story involves Herkko Ronkainen, a bandit chief said to have tested recruits by making them run with heavy sacks.

The course is 253.5 metres with two dry obstacles and a water obstacle about a metre deep. The carried partner must be 17 or older and weigh at least 49 kilograms, and anyone lighter straps on a loaded rucksack. Dropping her costs 15 seconds. Serious teams use the Estonian carry, where she hangs upside down against his back with her thighs hooked around his neck. In 2025 Caleb and Justine Roesler of Wisconsin became the first non-European champions. Why it’s weird: the prize is the carried partner’s weight in beer, which turns every training plan into a negotiation. Registration is open to anyone with a willing partner.

6. Boryeong Mud Festival, South Korea

The tidal flats on South Korea’s west coast hold mud loaded with germanium and bentonite, and in 1998 Boryeong launched a beach event to publicise a line of cosmetics made from it. The 2026 edition was the 29th, running 17 days from 24 July to 9 August at Daecheon Beach with mud pools, mud slides, mud wrestling, drone displays and K-pop sets.

Why it’s weird: an advertising campaign ate its own product. Visitors fly in from other continents to sit in cosmetic-grade sediment, and the skin cream has become the footnote. The official site sorts arrivals into zones and sells a ticket for each.

7. Monkey Buffet Festival, Lopburi, Thailand

In 1989 a Lopburi hotelier named Yongyuth Kitwatananusont concluded that the town’s long-tailed macaques were the reason tourists showed up, and that the monkeys were owed lunch. The banquet has run on the last Sunday of November ever since, putting the 2026 sitting on 29 November. Tables go up in front of Phra Prang Sam Yot, a 13th century Khmer temple, stacked with more than 4,000 kilograms of fruit, vegetables and Thai sweets alongside ice sculptures.

Why it’s weird: the guest list cannot be revised. By 2024 the macaque population had reached about 3,000 and friction with residents had grown serious enough that authorities ran a sterilisation programme, capturing 1,600 animals inside five months. The buffet went ahead regardless.

8. Night of the Radishes, Oaxaca, Mexico

Oaxaca grows radishes specifically so that nobody can eat them. The municipality sets aside land near El Tequio Park, feeds the crop hard and leaves it in the ground long past a normal harvest, yielding roots up to 50 centimetres long and three kilograms in weight. Contestants carve them into nativity scenes, saints, dancers and whatever else can be coaxed from a vegetable that fights back.

The formal competition dates to 1897 under mayor Francisco Vasconcelos. The 128th edition, on 23 December 2025, drew 137 works across radish, dried flower and corn husk categories, with a bracket for children as young as six. First prize in the traditional category is 15,000 pesos. One difference from the patience on show in our list of the strangest 3D prints: a printer does not wilt.

Why it’s weird: the entries reach the zócalo in the late afternoon, judging lands around nine, and then the display comes down. The sculptures have already begun sagging by then. Everyone in Oaxaca has known this since 1897 and everyone carves anyway.