Panagbenga Festival – Baguio, Philippines, 1-25 February 2018. If you like flowers, this festival is a must see. It has been celebrated in Baguio for generations, with the word Panagbenga meaning “a season of blooming” in the local language, Kankanaey.
Panagbenga Festival has individual themes for costume for boys as well as girls. Photo courtesy of Panagbenga Festival.
Panagbenga Festival offers a whole month of events including the biggest attractions – the Street Parade and Float Parade on 24 and 25 Feb. There are also kite flying, golf, marching band and pony-boy sessions which all attract hundreds if not thousands of participants to do their flowery thing in public.
Residents from the region gather to celebrate the arrival of a new spring season, and the blooming of new flowers to make it one of the biggest flower festivals in the world. The local people throw themselves vigorously into the task of building beautiful flower-decorated floats, and putting together highly rehearsed groups for the street dancing including people wearing flower themed costumes.
Every year produces a new crop of costumes on a given theme for the Parades. Photo courtesy of Panagbenga Festival.
Panagbenga is also marked as a tribute to the people of Baguio city on their survival and reconstruction after a major earthquake of 1990, and uses the local dance the Canao to mark the comeback. In the Canao, the partners hang special indigenous patterned blankets on each other, then do a kind of skipping Cossak-style circle dance. The dancers have to keep dancing until the spectators shout “Ooo Wag, Hoy!Hoy!,” which often results in extremely tired dancers.
Visit https://panagbengafestival.com for more details.