7 of the World’s Most Dangerous Festivals

Deck the halls, or deck each other? You may associate Christmas with Santa Claus or peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, but in some areas of Peru the day is celebrated with bare-knuckle mayhem. For the Takanakuy festival, which takes place on December 25, people settle their disputes and grievances by challenging each other to fistfights. These are held in makeshift rings with spectators looking on. Fighters and spectators attend the festival wearing costumes based on local folklore. To keep the proceedings from going out of control, the referees carry whips. Takanakuy has its roots in the indigenous pre-Christian traditions of the Chumbivilcas province of Peru, but in recent years it has spread more widely, to the consternation of law-enforcement officers.

Every year on Easter the Greek village of Vrontados engages in an unusual, dangerous custom. Two rival churches, Agios Markos and Panagia Erithiani, stage mock war, firing as many as 60,000 small rockets at each other’s bell towers. This takes place while services are being held in both churches. The light show in the night sky is spectacular, but some of the rockets inevitably veer off course, causing injuries, property damage, and occasionally death. Nobody is sure exactly how the tradition got started. One legend says that the village used to fire cannons over the sea to ward off pirates, but the cannons were taken away to prevent uprisings during the Ottoman occupation. After the War of Greek Independence (1823–31), residents celebrated having their access to munitions restored by shooting off fireworks.

The Spanish village of Castrillo de Murcia has some interesting ideas about childcare. Since the 17th century, the village has been holding a yearly ceremony in which infants are laid out on mattresses in the street. Actors dressed as devils then leap over them. The ritual supposedly dispels the children’s original sin. (For a variety of reasons, the Catholic Church disapproves of the ritual and asks that people stick to baptisms with water.) The festival hasn’t had any mishaps yet, but nobody would blame you if you held your breath until the jumping part is over.

For more than a century, a two-day festival has been held in Gloucestershire, England, centered on a strange competition. An 8-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese is rolled down a 200-yard hillside in the country. A group of runners chases it, trying to catch it. The problem is that the hill is too steep for a human to stay upright, so most of the runners fall awkwardly after a few steps and then tumble the rest of the way down. Theoretically, the cheese is given to the runner who catches it. But since a wheel of cheese travels downhill much faster than the fragile and oddly shaped bipeds pursuing it, the prize usually goes to the first person to reach the bottom of the hill. Bumps and bruises are guaranteed, and more serious injuries are a definite possibility. Local authorities have tried to discourage the festival, reminding the organizers (including the manufacturer of the cheese) that they could be held liable for any cheese-rolling injuries.

If oranges seem harmless to you, that’s probably because nobody has ever thrown one straight at your head. Every year in February the Italian town of Ivrea stages a citrus battle royale, reenacting a semilegendary medieval uprising in which the town overthrew a tyrant. A horse-drawn cart carrying oranges and players representing the tyrant’s evil henchmen is drawn into the square, where it is swarmed by hordes of noble orange-throwing townspeople. The players in the cart wear hockey-style protective gear. The people on foot have special uniforms that divide them into nine traditional squads but nothing to soften the impact of an orange arriving at high speed. Cuts and bruises are to be expected. The sting of orange juice in a cut is certainly an acquired taste. The battle looks like chaos, but there is an important limit: throwing oranges at the horses is strictly forbidden.

Everybody does vacations their own way. Some of us like to go to museums or restaurants, while others like to be chased down the street by angry farm animals. If you’re in the latter category, head to the Fiesta de San Fermín, held in July in Pamplona, Spain. Early in the morning on each day of the festival, about 2,000 brave souls line up at the start of an 875-meter (half-mile) running course through the streets of the city center. The fun starts at 8:00 am, when the human runners sprint down the course immediately followed by six charging bulls. Injuries are rarer than you’d think, but tramplings and gorings—including fatal ones—do occur. More than half of the participants in most runnings of the bulls are tourists. This probably owes something to the American writer Ernest Hemingway, who popularized the festival after he attended in the 1920s.

Once every six years the Onbashira festival takes place in the Lake Suwa region of Nagano prefecture in Japan. The purpose of the festival is to replace the 16 log pillars that stand at the corners of the four buildings of the Suwa Grand Shrine. The festivities begin in the mountains in April when 16 carefully chosen fir trees in the mountains are cut down using traditional logging tools. They are then dragged down to the temple without the use of mechanized equipment. The logs are usually about 20 meters long and weigh as much as 12 tonnes, so people have to work in large teams to hoist them up mountains and across rivers. The entire journey, usually about 10 kilometers, is treacherous. The deadliest part, though, comes when the logs have to be moved downhill. To prove their bravery, men ride straddling the logs as they hurtle down the mountainside. This can result in devastating injuries and death.