carnival

Our Carnival is a high-energy month-long celebration of pageants, music competitions, street parties, and spectacular parades, delighting and uniting the entire country. All year long, locals look forward to the catchy roadmarch and calypso tunes, the throbbing sound trucks, the glittering costumes, the magnificent floats, the Carnival queen coronations, and the hip-shaking madness. Wanna join us? We’d love for you to partake in any of our exciting Aruba Carnival events!
Carnival is celebrated in many countries around the world as a pre-Lenten festival, but here’s the scoop on how it began in Aruba. Carnival was born in 1954 as a series of small street festivals. The Tivoli Club, Aruba’s oldest private social club, was the first to have a pre-Lenten celebration in Oranjestad in February 1944. The Allied victory of World War II was commemorated by a large parade in San Nicolas, comprised largely of Caribbean-English immigrants who came to Aruba to work at the Lago Oil Refinery. The first steel and brass bands debuted a few years later, and small parades sprouted here and there.