Festivals · Festes
The festival year
L'any de les festes · 40.56° N 8.32° E
Alghero keeps a Catalan calendar inside an Italian region: fire in January, a Holy Week sung in polyphony, a patron saint at the end of September. Everything on this page happens within about 100 km of the old town, and most of it far closer.
Photo Gianni Careddu / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The year at a glance
- Sant'Antonio Abate
- Carrasegare 'Osincu
- Lo Carraixali de l'Alguer
- Bogamarì
- Setmana Santa
- Lunissanti
- Cavalcata Sarda
- Festha Manna
- Cantine Aperte
- Abbabula
- JazzAlguer
- Ittiri Folk Festa
- Santa Maria del Mare
- Time in Jazz
- Faradda di li Candareri
- Regata della Vela Latina
- Nostra Signora de Regnos Altos
- Sant Miquel
- Rally Italia Sardegna
- Is Animeddas
- Cap d'Any de l'Alguer
9 in Alghero12 within 100 kmEach bar covers the months a festival can fall in; a dashed bar means the date moves. Pick one to jump to it.
Twenty-one dates · eight towns
January to December
The festival year here is built on saints' days, on Sundays counted from Easter and on a handful of fixed weekends in August. Below, each one in order, with where it happens and how far that is from Alghero.
Jan
16–17 January
Sant'Antonio Abate
Sant Antoni Abat
AlgheroIn town
A bonfire is lit on the eve of the saint's day. The fire, not the procession, is the point.
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In Sardinia the night of 16 January belongs to fire. A stack of wood is blessed and lit, people stand around it with wine and something sweet, and the next morning the saint is carried out to bless the fields and the animals. The same fire opens the carnival season across the island: the first masks appear the moment it is burning.
LinksComune di Alghero
17 January to Shrove Tuesday
Carrasegare 'Osincu
Carnevale di Bosa
Bosa45 km
Sardinia's most improvised carnival — barely any floats, no script, and the whole town in costume.
More about this festival
The season opens with the Sant'Antonio bonfire and closes on Shrove Tuesday with two rites in one day. In the morning s'Attitidu: figures dressed in black mourning a doll that stands for the dead king of carnival, wailing their way through the streets. After dark Giolzi, the same crowd in white, hunting him with lanterns until his effigy is burned. Between the two the town improvises — satire, disguise and whatever the year has earned.
Feb
Carnival week, February
Lo Carraixali de l'Alguer
Carnevale algherese
AlgheroIn town
Allegorical floats through the streets by the port, aimed squarely at children and families.
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Alghero's carnival is the domestic kind: floats built over the winter, school groups, the town band, and a frittellata — a mass frying of carnival fritters — to finish. It runs in the week before Ash Wednesday, so the date moves with Easter. For the older and stranger version of Sardinian carnival, drive down the coast to Bosa.
Weekends, February to early April
Bogamarì
Sagra del riccio di mare
AlgheroIn town
Sea urchins opened on the quay and eaten there, with bread and a glass of white.
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Bogamarì is the Algherese word for sea urchin. The ones caught here feed on posidonia and are prized for it, and the season falls in the cold months, when the roe is full. On festival weekends stalls go up along the port and fishermen open the urchins in front of you; restaurants in town put a sea-urchin dish on the menu for the whole run. Fishing is regulated season by season, so the calendar can shift.
LinksComune di Alghero
Mar
Holy Week, March or April
Setmana Santa
Settimana Santa
AlgheroIn town
Spanish-rooted rites kept in Catalan Alghero since the end of the sixteenth century.
More about this festival
The week runs from the Friday of Sorrows to Easter Monday, and two nights carry it. On Holy Thursday, Les Cerques moves between the churches of the old town. On Good Friday comes the Desclavament — the deposition, staged inside the church, the body lowered from the cross — and after it a procession that crosses the centre behind polyphonic choirs, lit by torches. All of it is free and all of it is crowded.
LinksFondazione Alghero
Monday after Palm Sunday
Lunissanti
Lunedì Santo
Castelsardo67 km
Hooded confraternities carry the instruments of the Passion, singing, from seven in the morning until night.
More about this festival
Castelsardo keeps its main Holy Week rite on the Monday after Palm Sunday rather than on Good Friday, a survival usually attributed to Benedictine monks. The Mysteries are handed out at dawn in the church of Santa Maria, then carried out to the basilica of Nostra Signora di Tergu and back. The night procession leaves the cathedral at half past eight, with choirs alternating along the way.
LinksSardegnaTurismo
May
Penultimate Sunday of May
Cavalcata Sarda
Sassari37 km
Three and a half thousand people in traditional dress from all over the island, then bareback racing.
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Not a religious feast: it was staged for a royal visit in the nineteenth century and revived in 1951. The morning is the parade — dozens of groups on foot and on horseback, each in the dress of its own village, which in Sardinia changes from one valley to the next. In the afternoon the pariglie, riders standing upright on galloping horses, run at the Pinna racecourse. The evening ends in Piazza d'Italia with launeddas, ballu tundu and canto a tenore.
May, around Pentecost
Festha Manna
Santi Gavino, Proto e Gianuario
Porto Torres36 km
A night pilgrimage on foot from Sassari cathedral to the basilica of San Gavino.
More about this festival
Porto Torres honours its three martyrs — Gavino, Proto and Gianuario — over more than a month, but the core is one weekend. On 3 May the statues are carried from the basilica down to Balai by the sea. The climax comes on the eve of Pentecost, when the pilgrimage leaves Sassari at ten at night and walks to the basilica in the dark. A fair fills the old centre around it for three days.
Last weekend of May
Cantine Aperte
Alghero · NurraIn town
The estates on the plain north of town open their gates for the day.
More about this festival
A national wine-tourism day, running since 1993. Around Alghero it means the big Nurra estates: Sella & Mosca, whose vineyards sit on the limestone plain towards Fertilia, and the growers' cooperative at Santa Maria La Palma. Torbato is the one to ask for — a white grape brought over in the Catalan-Aragonese period and planted today on fewer than a hundred hectares, almost all of them here. Vermentino and Cannonau are the safer bets.
Jun
Late June to late July
Abbabula
Sassari and around37 km
A month of songwriters and bands, spread between Sassari, Porto Torres, Sennori and Alghero.
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Run by a Sassari cooperative since the late 1990s, Abbabula puts concerts in places that are not concert halls: the atrium of the San Gavino basilica, a disused tuff quarry at Sennori, a beach bar at Porto Ferro, and a run of nights in Sassari's Piazza Università. The bill leans towards Italian songwriting with international names attached.
Tickets & programmefestivalabbabula.com
Concerts from June to October
JazzAlguer
AlgheroIn town
Jazz in a nuraghe, a wine cellar and a pine grove — the venues are half the programme.
More about this festival
Founded in 2017 and directed for its first three years by Paolo Fresu, JazzAlguer spreads a season across the year instead of packing it into a week. Concerts land at Lo Quarter in the old town, but also at the Palmavera nuraghe, the Sella & Mosca cellars and the pines behind Mugoni beach. Running alongside it through July and August, a separate classical season plays in the cloister of San Francesco.
Tickets & programmejazzalguer.it
Jul
Six days in mid-July
Ittiri Folk Festa
Ittiri29 km
An international folk festival that opens in Sassari and closes on a square in Alghero.
More about this festival
Held since the mid-1980s in Ittiri, half an hour inland, the festival brings dance groups from several continents and sets them beside Sardinian ones. Most of it fills the Missingiagu park and the streets of the village, with a preview evening in Sassari and a closing night in Alghero's Piazza Lo Quarter — so you can catch the end of it without leaving town.
Aug
First Sunday of August
Santa Maria del Mare
Madonna del Mare
Bosa45 km
A statue of the Madonna carried up the river Temo by a convoy of decorated boats.
More about this festival
The feast goes back to a statue found in 1675. On the Sunday morning boats dressed with flags, reeds and flowers leave Bosa Marina and escort the Madonna up the Temo to the cathedral in town; in the afternoon the convoy makes the same journey back. If the sea allows it, a wreath is dropped beyond the tower for those lost at sea.
LinksBosa Turismo
8–16 August
Time in Jazz
Berchidda103 km
Paolo Fresu's festival: nine days of concerts in churches, oak woods and village squares.
More about this festival
Fresu started it in his home village in 1988 and it has become the island's best-known jazz festival. Berchidda's Piazza del Popolo takes the evening headliners; the daytime concerts move around Logudoro and Gallura — a country church, a clearing in the Limbara forest, a farmyard — and are the reason people come back. It is the furthest thing on this page, a little over an hour and a half by car.
Tickets & programmetimeinjazz.it
14 August
Faradda di li Candareri
Discesa dei Candelieri
Sassari37 km
Thirteen wooden columns, danced through the old town by the guilds that own them.
More about this festival
The candelieri are painted wooden pillars about three metres tall, weighing some four hundred kilos each, carried on the shoulders of the gremi — descendants of the city's craft guilds. They do not simply process: they are made to dance to drum and pipe, all the way down to the church of Santa Maria di Betlem. The vow behind it dates to a plague in 1652, and UNESCO listed the festival as intangible heritage in 2013.
Late August
Regata della Vela Latina
Stintino54 km
The last Italian fleet to keep the lateen rig, racing out of the old harbour.
More about this festival
Two brothers started the regatta in 1983, trying to keep Stintino's working boats afloat, and it became the reference event for Mediterranean lateen sail in Italy; some editions have drawn more than a hundred boats. Racing runs out of the Porto Vecchio, the narrow inlet the village was built around. The beach at La Pelosa is ten minutes further north, so the day is easy to combine.
Sep
Second weekend of September
Nostra Signora de Regnos Altos
Bosa45 km
The old quarter is hung with greenery and small altars for the Madonna to stop at.
More about this festival
The statuette was found in the ruins of the Malaspina castle in 1847, and the feast has followed the same route ever since: down from the castle chapel through Sa Costa to the cathedral on Saturday, back up on Sunday. What makes it is sos altarittos — small altars built into doorways and windows along the way, dressed with lace, flowers and family linen, each one a stop for the rosary and for gosos sung in Sardinian.
Around 29 September
Sant Miquel
San Michele Arcangelo
AlgheroIn town
The patron saint's day, and the town's way of admitting that summer is over.
More about this festival
Six days or so of concerts, exhibitions, guided walks and food around the feast of Saint Michael on 29 September, ending with the solemn mass in the cathedral and a procession through the old town. Recent editions have added Catalan touches the town takes seriously — castellers building human towers, and giant puppets — a reminder of where the place came from.
LinksFondazione Alghero
Oct
Autumn — the date moves
Rally Italia Sardegna
AlgheroIn town
The World Rally Championship's Sardinian round, with the service park on the seafront.
More about this festival
Alghero has hosted the island's WRC round most years since 2014, with the service park set up on Lungomare Barcellona and the ceremonial finish under the bastions. The stages themselves run on gravel in the hills inland. Both the date and the host town have moved between editions — it has been June, it has been October, and one recent year it went to Olbia — so check before you plan a trip around it.
31 October – 1 November
Is Animeddas
Su Mortu Mortu
Across Sardinia
Children go door to door for the souls, and are paid in sweets and dried fruit.
More about this festival
Older than the imported Halloween and still going: on the night between 31 October and 1 November children knock on doors and ask for an offering for the little souls, answering “mortu mortu” when asked who is there. They are given sweets, nuts and dried figs, and in return the household is prayed for. The name changes across the island — is animeddas, su mortu mortu, is panixeddas.
LinksSardegnaTurismo
Dec
Late November to early January
Cap d'Any de l'Alguer
Capodanno di Sardegna
AlgheroIn town
Six weeks of markets and lights, ending with free concerts and a New Year's Eve crowd at the port.
More about this festival
Alghero was the first town in Sardinia to build a whole programme around New Year, and has run it since 1995. Christmas markets and an ice rink open in the old town at the end of November; the last days of December bring free concerts to Piazzale della Pace, the square above the marina; and the programme carries on into the first week of January. It is the busiest the town gets outside August.
LinksFondazione Alghero
Dates are the ones these festivals usually keep, not a schedule. Anything tied to Easter moves every year, and programmes are published a few weeks ahead — check the official page before you book.
Photos Gianni Careddu, Ppf 23, Stefano Bussolon, Marco Busdraghi, Sailko, Louis.attene, Cristiano Cani, Tasi Zoltán, Gaelle Marcel, Jonathan Denney, Fede Casanova, Adam Whitlock / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA. Where no free photograph of a festival exists, the picture is illustrative and its description says what it actually shows.