Festivals

The Seminole Arts Celebration offers tradition — fry bread and alligator wrestling — but also celebrates the diversity of native cultures. This year’s event is Nov. 6-7, 2020.

Florida loves a good festival. Here are 75 hand-picked festivals around the state that range from funky local bashes to huge nationally known cultural events.

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.

Micanopy is right off I-75 near Gainesville, but it feels far away — like a small town in a Florida long gone. Its jewel is the 1845 Herlong Mansion B&B.

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.

You can get gator tail and swamp cabbage at this festival. But the real reason to go is to revel in a last corner of small town America in Florida — beauty pageants, high school bands, armadillo races and a rodeo.

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.

This isn’t frozen shrimp or imported shrimp or farmed shrimp. The huge boiling pots at the Fort Myers Beach Shrimp Festival are filled with fresh, right-off-the-boat Gulf pink shrimp. Members of the Lions Club have perfected the cooking technique over 50 years of Shrimp Festivals.

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.

TAMPA — The Florida State Fair marks its 114th year. Our annual guide includes campground and lodging links with a full menu of things to do nearby.