A calendar of reasons to travel
The events section covers gatherings that are worth building a trip around: Semana Santa in Seville in the week before Easter, the Montreux Jazz Festival on Lake Geneva in July, Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming, the Jungfrau Marathon below the Eiger in September, the Şeb-i Arus ceremonies of the whirling dervishes in Konya in December and the Bluff Oyster and Food Festival at the southern tip of New Zealand.
Each event page explains what happens, when it falls, how the dates move from year to year and how to plan around the crowds.
Planning around an event
Big events change a town. Rooms in Seville during Holy Week, in Montreux during the festival fortnight or in Konya around 17 December sell out early, and prices rise accordingly. The event pages say how far ahead to plan, which days are busiest and where to stay if the centre is full.
Dates are confirmed with the organisers where they publish them; where they do not, the pages describe the usual pattern rather than guessing a day.
Getting there and getting around
Most of the events sit within reach of a major airport or rail hub. Seville has direct high-speed trains from Madrid, Montreux and Interlaken are both on the Swiss rail network, Konya is linked to Ankara and Istanbul by fast trains, and Cheyenne is about ninety minutes by road from Denver. Bluff lies at the end of State Highway 1, half an hour south of Invercargill airport. During the busiest days public transport is usually the easier choice, because roads close for processions, races and parades and parking near the centre fills early. Each event page gives the nearest airport and the simplest route in.
Accommodation is the other constraint. For the larger events, staying one stop away, in Lausanne or Vevey for Montreux, in Bern for the Jungfrau Marathon or in Fort Collins for Cheyenne, is often cheaper and calmer, and the pages name the towns that work as alternative bases. For Semana Santa, the towns of Carmona and Jerez de la Frontera hold their own processions and make good overnight alternatives when rooms in Seville run out.
Music, sport, faith and food
The calendar is deliberately mixed. Two events are religious: the Holy Week processions of Seville, carried by brotherhoods through the streets for days, and the Şeb-i Arus ceremonies in Konya, where the sema of the whirling dervishes marks the death of the poet Rumi. Two are sporting: the Jungfrau Marathon, which climbs from Interlaken towards the Eiger glacier, and the rodeo at the heart of Cheyenne Frontier Days, held every July since 1897.
The Montreux Jazz Festival brings music to the shore of Lake Geneva for a fortnight in July, and the Bluff Oyster and Food Festival celebrates one of New Zealand’s best-known seafoods at the bottom of the South Island. Each event page links to the stories and guides for the same region, so an event can become the anchor of a longer trip.
