Festivals

Florida harvest festivals and farm tours demonstrate that you can soak up a little autumn spirit, even in Florida. All across Florida, farms create family fun with traditional harvest activities like pumpkin patches and corn mazes.

Florida Rambler’s comprehensive Holiday Boat Parades calendar provides dates and links to boat parades around the state.

Due to Hurricane Ian, the annual Naples Stone Crab Festival has been postponed. A new date has not been announced.

Micanopy is right off I-75 near Gainesville, but it feels far away — like a small town in a Florida long gone. The Micanopy Fall Festival is Oct. 29-30, and in that part of Florida, it looks and feels a little like fall.

Comprehensive listing of Florida Oktoberfests, many of them sponsored by local German-American clubs, who go all out with authentic German bands, beers and German food.

The Seminole Arts Celebration offers tradition — fry bread and alligator wrestling — but also celebrates the diversity of native cultures. In 2022, the highlight will be New Zealand’s HAKA Māori Cultural Experience.

Florida Seafood Festival celebrates Apalachicola’s vibrant fishing industry, which produces 90% of the state’s oysters. This guide features camping, lodging and things to do near Apalachicola. The 2022 festival is scheduled for Nov. 4-5.

Seafood festivals are common in Florida, but Cedar Key Seafood Festival is uncommonly appealing. Not only is Cedar Key historic and charming, it’s also clam capital of America.

This small town festival celebrates a uniquely Lake Placid product: caladiums, a colorful plant grown commercially almost nowhere else. There’ll be music, food, a car show, arts and crafts plus bus tours of the caladium fields.

The annual Charlotte Harbor Freedom Swim on July 4 is a non-competititve swim across the 1.5-mile wide Peace River. Some kayak, some swim, some just float. It’s been a local tradition for 30 years.

The Florida Folk Festival marks its 70th year at Stephen Foster State Park over Memorial Day Weekend 2022. The annual event celebrates Florida’s land, people and diverse cultural heritage.

Sebring, a small town along the lovely Lake Wales Ridge in Central Florida, is staking a claim for something new — Florida’s first (and only) craft soda festival, the Sebring Soda Festival. Local small-batch sodas made with real sugar are making a comeback, partly as an outgrowth of the craft beer phenomenon. This Sebring festival is a good opportunity to taste what it’s all about.

The Marathon Seafood Festival calls itself the Original Marathon Seafood Festival to emphasize it’s the real deal – indigenous and authentic. Marathon is a fishing town, and you don’t get fish any fresher than here, unless you catch it yourself.

The Grant Seafood Festival is put on by community volunteers and has been held every year since 1966 in this riverside enclave between Melbourne and Sebastian.

Like Cedar Key itself, the Cedar Key Art Festival is a slice of authentic Old Florida. This historic small town is located on an island on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Bikers converge on Daytona Beach every March for Bike Week, but visitors often have a tough time finding a place to stay or camp and get lost in a sea of things-to-do.