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Bookmark & shareEvery even year, San José hosts the biannual Festival de Arte , a city-wide arts showcase featuring theater, music, dance and film. It is held for two weeks in March. Día de San José, on March 19, marks San José's day for its patron saint with masses in some churches. The day used to be a holiday, but modernization has quickly done away with that.
The Festival de las Carretas (Ox-cart Festival) takes place every November, and is a celebration of the country's agricultural heritage. The highlight is a parade of ox-carts down Paseo Colón. A month later on Paseo Colón is the Festival de Luz (Festival of Light), a Christmas parade marked by an absurd amount of plastic 'snow'.
If you're in the San José area between Christmas and New Year's Eve, you absolutely have to visit Las Fiestas de Zapote, a week-long holiday celebration of all things Costa Rican (namely rodeos, cowboys, carnival rides, fried food and a whole lot of drinking). The celebration, which annually draws in tens of thousands of Ticos, takes place in the suburb of Zapote, just southeast of the city.
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