Fiesta is like a Mexican Mardi Gras—it’s the biggest party in Texas, and in a state that size, that’s really saying something!
What better setting for this hundred-year-old, ten-day party than historic San Antonio? Here, a floating parade and roving mariachi bands can drift through the cafés and bars nestled along the city’s world famous River Walk. And in nearby La Villita, an historic arts village once the site of Santa Ana’s cannon line during the Battle of the Alamo, you will find the biggest party of them all: NIOSA, or Night in Old San Antonio.
Four nights every year, NIOSA claims La Villita, a riot of food, music, and drinks that are part of the unique culture of San Antonio, a vibrant heritage that is lovingly preserved through the Conservation Society. Hundreds of thousands of cowboy booted revelers clomp through fifteen different cultural areas representing the diverse people who settled this wild frontier. Like the threat of cannons so many years ago, La Villita is today supercharged with Tejano music and beer bars, blues and Dixieland bands, a German polka or two alongside Flamenco dancers, as well as Mexican huipils and French berets.
So many cultures it makes your head spin. And speaking of heads, you better watch yours! Revelers lurk with cascarones waiting to break the wildly colored eggshells filled with bright confetti on your head—but going home with confetti-free hair is unthinkable! Don’t be a Grinchito—buy a carton of fun cascarones and return the favor, until the stones of old La Villita are covered in neon paper shreds.
Texans love pageantry, and at the heart of the wild Fiesta festivities is its own royal court, whose lavish Coronation is the celebration’s true heart of gold. Take a regular debutante ball, add a dash of fiery chili peppers and a pinch of ten gallon Texas pride, and you get the Coronation as only San Antonio could do it. While King Antonio LXXXIII presides over Fiesta, during the gilded Coronation, the Queen and her court, the elite daughters of the Order of the Alamo, come out in true regal style.
