Everyone leaves at the end of August, and everyone is wrong. The sea is warmer in September than it was in June. Rooms cost half what they did. And the fiesta calendar, far from shutting down, moves into the part of the year the towns actually keep for themselves — harvest fairs, patron saints, the first new wine, and Christmas built at a scale that has to be seen rather than described.

Here is what is on, coast by coast, between now and Twelfth Night.

September: the crowds go, the fiestas stay

September is the busiest month on this whole list, because it is when Spain celebrates the end of the harvest and the end of the heat at the same time.

Festes de Santa Tecla, Tarragona, 15-24 September. Five hundred-odd events, and the reason to go is the castells — the human towers, eight and nine levels high, built by four competing local colles. The tower days are the 20th, 23rd and 24th. Nothing else in Catalonia comes close.

Festes de la Mare de Déu de Gràcia, Maó, 4-9 September. The last and biggest of Menorca's horse fiestas. Riders take black Menorquín horses into a packed crowd and rear them up on their hind legs while people reach in to touch the animal's chest. Main days the 7th and 8th.

Fiesta del Charco, La Aldea de San Nicolás, 11 September. At five in the afternoon the mayor fires a rocket and 15,000 people throw themselves into a coastal lagoon to catch fish with their hands. Pre-Hispanic, entirely serious, and almost nobody there is a tourist.

Also this month: the Lloret Drone Festival on the 11th and 12th, 300 drones over the bay; the Empordà Wine & Food Festival in Palamós, 25-27 September, where the winemakers pour their own bottles on the seafront; the village Feria de las Maravillas in Maro above Nerja; and a boat trip out of Roses with the fishermen's guild biologist to see how the bay's sea bream are actually raised, five euros.

October: fairs, film and the first cold nights

Sitges Film Festival, 8-18 October. One of the three biggest genre film festivals on earth, in a seaside town of 30,000 people. Most screenings carry English subtitles and a good share of the films are in English anyway. The Zombie Walk fills the seafront.

Fires de Sant Narcís, Girona, 23 October-1 November. The biggest autumn festival within reach of the Costa Brava — giants, sardanes, a fairground in the Devesa park, free concerts across the city. Forty minutes inland, and the coast is empty by then anyway.

Fairs. The Fira d'Alcúdia fills the walled town for the first weekend of October; Gandia holds its Fira i Festes for Sant Francesc de Borja on the same dates; and Almuñécar's hill barrio of Torrecuevas throws a party for the custard-apple harvest around the 12th.

Noche de Finaos, Canary Islands, 31 October. The islands' own version of All Saints, and older than Halloween: chestnuts, walnuts, sweet wine, and families telling stories about the people they have lost. Children go door to door asking ¿hay santos? Catalonia does the same night as the castanyada.

November: new wine and the empty coast

November is the quietest month of the year on the Spanish coast, and if you like a beach to yourself it is the best one.

Tablas de San Andrés, Icod de los Vinos, 29-30 November. The night the barrels are opened. Icod marks it by greasing pine boards and riding them down the town's steepest streets, while the bodegas pour the year's new wine and the chestnuts roast in the street. It is as alarming as it sounds.

Fiestas Mayores Patronales, Benidorm, 6-11 November. There is a Benidorm that has nothing to do with the towers, and this is the week you can see it — the old town, the neighbourhood peñas, and a fiesta run by and for the people who live there.

Also: the Fira de Pollença in mid-November, an old-style Mallorcan produce fair with no interest in whether visitors turn up.

December and Twelfth Night: the good bit

Spanish Christmas peaks on 5 January, not 25 December, and it is built outdoors.

Belén Gigante, Alicante, late November to 5 January. The largest nativity scene in the world, Guinness-certified: a seventeen-metre Saint Joseph standing in the main square. Free, and best after dark.

Málaga's Christmas lights, late November to 6 January. Calle Larios roofed end to end in a couple of million LEDs, run as a choreographed light-and-sound show three times a night. Go on a weeknight.

Cabalgata de Reyes, 5 January. Every town in Spain parades the Three Kings through its streets throwing sweets, the evening before children get their presents. Palma's arrive by sea, on a traditional wooden llaüt that ties up at the old quay at six.

Also in December: Mazarrón's medieval market over the early-December long weekend, on a stretch of coast that in winter is as close to empty as Spain gets.

A word on dates

Spanish town halls publish their programmes two to four weeks ahead, not months. Anything here marked as expected dates rather than confirmed follows a reliable annual pattern — the second weekend of November, the 12 October holiday — but the detail firms up close to the day. Check the ayuntamiento before you book flights around a specific fiesta, and treat everything from mid-November onward as a plan rather than a timetable.

Practical bit. Autumn is the season a hire car earns its keep more than any other. The events worth travelling for are inland and in villages — Icod, Torrecuevas, Girona, Barlovento — and off-season bus timetables thin out exactly when the fiestas run late. Book ahead anyway: the cars go to the winter-sun regulars, and the Canary Islands in particular run short from November.

Live dates

What's on nearby.

Mallorca 11Sep
Food & Drink

Festa des Vermar 2026

Mallorca's wine-harvest festival in Binissalem — grape-treading, a famous grape fight and weeks of celebration.

Mallorca
Costa Brava 11Sep
Family

Lloret Drone Festival 2026

Three hundred synchronised drones over Lloret bay on two September nights, with two completely different shows — one on

Lloret de Mar
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