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.

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.

The Florida Blueberry Festival highlights not just Florida’s blueberry crop but also Brooksville, a lovely unspoiled region of Florida that is a great place for hiking, biking, kayaking and exploring.

Like a state fair, the Strawberry Festival has agricultural displays, livestock shows, arts and crafts, local food and a huge carnival midway. But its entertainment line-up is what’s extraordinary year after year.