The Return of the Gilroy Garlic Festival

V. Iyengar, Editor-in-Chief
📍 Silicon Valley, USA

Get giddy garlic groupies, for the Gilroy Garlic Festival has Returned!

This past weekend, July 25th-27th, marked the first in-person Gilroy Garlic festival in 6 years and the first festival in 3 years.

The Gilroy Garlic Festival is an annual food festival held in Gilroy, CA, and includes every possible garlic-themed item one could imagine, from garlicky calamari to Garzilla, a 1000-pound garlic bulb sculpture which is lit like a torch each year as a tradition. The first Gilroy Garlic festival was held in 1979 and since then, the event has raised millions of dollars to benefit schools and non-profit organizations in the local community.

Notably, the Gilroy Garlic Festival has experienced significant challenges in the last decade. Prior to this weekend, the last in-person Gilroy Garlic Festival was held in 2019, where a shooting tragically injured 12 festival goers and resulted in the death of 2 children, took place. Subsequently, victims of the shooting filed a lawsuit against the festival, claiming that the allegedly lackluster security was to blame for the shooting. Then, in 2020 the festival was canceled for the first time, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, a drive-through festival was held on July 23–25, July 30–31, and August 1, 2021, though. In 2022, the festival was canceled indefinitely. Event organizers cited economic reasons, namely higher insurance costs due to 2019’s shooting. 

In its place, from 2022-2024, the California Garlic Festival, organized by the Noceti Group, which also hosts the annual California Asparagus Festival in Stockton, CA, was held in San Joaquin County in 2022 and 2023 and in Los Banos in 2024. 

This year marked the return of an in-person, but scaled-back version of the original Gilroy Garlic Festival, as tickets were limited to 3,000 people per day. All 9,000 tickets sold out quickly, which indicates a long and bright future for the iconic festival.