Sixteen parishes, eighteen festas, and a festa somewhere most weekends from the end of May to the middle of September. Here is when each one falls, and why the date is a rule rather than a number.
18 festas, 16 parishes
Late May to mid-September
Three fall on public holidays
Nearly every listing of Gozo festas you will find prints a column of
dates for one year and then quietly rots. The parishes do not work in
dates. They work in rules: the last Sunday of July, the Sunday closest
to 24 June, the seventieth day after Easter. That is what is on this
page, which is why it will still be right in five years.
Three sit on a fixed date, and all three are public holidays as well as
festas: Nadur on 29 June, Santa Marija at the Victoria Cathedral on 15
August, and Xagħra on 8 September. Kerċem's St Gregory on 12 March is
fixed too but is not a day off. Everything else moves with the
calendar.
The season proper runs from the last Sunday of May to the second Sunday
of September. Two sit outside it: Kerċem opens the year in March, and
Santa Luċija closes it in December, in a hamlet of a few hundred people
and in the cold.
Through the year, in order
Ordered as the season runs. For the exact Sunday in a given year,
the parish is the authority and will tell you: tourism listings
contradict each other on at least two of these, which is the reason
this page gives you the rule instead.
Marsalforn and Mġarr are not on this list because neither is a parish
in its own right. Both keep a chapel feast, and both empty out to the
festa of the village they belong to.
How a festa actually works
A festa is a week, not a day. It opens with a novena or a triduum of
services, which is the part most visitors never see and the part the
parish would say is the point of it. By midweek the street decoration
is up: the painted pedestals along the main road, the banners between
the houses, the statues of saints set out on the corners.
The eve is the loud night. The band club marches through the village
with a crowd behind it, the ground fireworks go off in the square, and
the bars stay open very late. If you only go to one night of a Gozitan
festa, go to that one.
The Sunday itself is quieter until the evening, when the titular statue
is carried out of the church and through the streets on the shoulders of
the men of the parish. The aerial fireworks close the night. Gozitan
firework making is competitive to a degree that is hard to convey, and
Fontana in particular has a long association with it.
The band clubs, and why there are two
A każin is a band club, and in several Gozitan villages there are two
of them: one for the titular saint and one for a secondary devotion.
They are social clubs with a bar, a rehearsal room and a balcony over
the square, and they are the organising engine behind the festa.
Victoria is the clearest case. La Stella keeps St George on the third
Sunday of July; the Leone keeps Santa Marija at the Cathedral on 15
August. Both were formed in the second half of the nineteenth century,
both have premises on Republic Street, and the competition between
them, in fireworks, in decoration, in the size of the crowd, is a real
feature of the city's summer rather than a tourist-board story.
You can walk into a każin bar. Prices are low, the welcome is ordinary
rather than effusive, and it is one of the few places on the island
where you will be the only visitor in the room.
The other dates that shape a visit
Not festas, not days off, but worth knowing before you book.
Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu 22 June
The national shrine above Għarb keeps its feast. Not a public holiday, but the busiest day of the year at the basilica.
Carnival a moveable feast, in January, February or March
The weekend before Lent. Nadur’s is the spontaneous, unjudged, faintly unsettling one, and it runs at night.
Good Friday processions a moveable feast, in March or April
Afternoon and evening processions in Victoria, Xagħra, Nadur, Qala, Żebbuġ and Għarb. Roads through the cores close.
Easter Sunday a moveable feast, in March or April
Morning processions with the Risen Christ, which in several villages involve running the statue uphill.
Going to one
Park a long way out and walk. The village cores close to traffic and
the lanes were not built for cars at the best of times. Go late: the
marches and the fireworks are evening and night events, and a village
at six o'clock tells you nothing about the same village at eleven.
The fireworks are loud in a way that surprises people, which matters
if you have a small child or a dog with you. Food is stalls rather
than restaurants on the night, and the restaurants in a village
holding its festa will be full.
One practical warning for the middle of August: Santa Marija week is
the busiest of the Maltese year, the ferry queues are long, and beds
in Gozo are both scarce and dear. If you are coming for a festa and
have a choice, the June and July ones are easier in every respect.
The rules above were derived by taking the dates two independent
listings gave for 2026 and working back to the day of the week each
one landed on. That caught two errors this site had been carrying.
Each village page has its own parish and its own festa
Patron, when the parish was established, and what there is to see inside the church.
One email a month from the island: what has opened or closed, when the festas fall, what is in season, and anything we have corrected. No partner emails, and one click to leave.
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