Las Parrandas de Remedios: Around nine in the evening on 24 December, in a town most visitors to Cuba drive past on the way to a beach, the lights in the main square go out. Then one half of the square comes back on — a structure the height of a nine-storey building, built out of wood, wire and thousands of bulbs, hidden behind scaffolding and tarpaulin until that exact moment. A few minutes later the other half of the square answers.
Nobody outside the barrio that built it has seen either one before. That’s the whole point.
This is Remedios, in Villa Clara province, and what’s happening is a parranda. The town has been doing it since 1820, which makes it the oldest continuously running festival in Cuba, and in 2018 UNESCO put it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — file number 01405, covering eighteen communities in the centre of the island. Remedios is where it started and where it’s still biggest.
It started because a priest couldn’t fill his church
The story every remediano tells is the same one, and it’s small enough to be true. The parish priest — Francisco Vigil de Quiñones, an Asturian, though even his name comes down to us with the spelling unsettled — had a problem with the midnight Christmas mass. People weren’t coming. Around 1820 he handed a group of boys whistles, horns and tin cans and sent them into the streets to make enough noise that nobody could stay in bed.
It worked. Then it kept working, and then it stopped being about the mass. Within a few decades the noise had organised itself: the boys became competing groups, the groups became the two halves of the town, and the racket acquired music, floats, structures and, eventually, industrial quantities of gunpowder. The mass is still in there — at midnight everything pauses for it — but it stopped being the reason a long time ago.
Once it spread, it spread hard. The Las parrandas de Remedios was celebrated in more than forty municipalities across central Cuba at its peak. Eighteen still hold it, and those eighteen are what UNESCO actually inscribed.
The rooster and the hawk
Remedios splits in two. Barrio San Salvador takes the rooster as its emblem and red and blue as its colours. Barrio El Carmen takes the hawk — the gavilán — and a globe, and works in brown. You are born into one or the other. People who move away come back for it. People who marry across the line are a running local joke that has been running for about a century and a half.
Preparation takes most of the year and it’s carried out in secret. Carpenters, electricians, seamstresses, painters, pyrotechnicians, drivers, people whose whole contribution is buying materials — the workshops run behind closed doors, and each barrio sends people to find out what the other one is building. UNESCO’s own listing uses the word ‘spies’, which is the sort of sentence you don’t expect from a UN agency. Sabotaging the surprise is part of the tradition and has its own etiquette.
Everyone takes part. That isn’t a figure of speech and UNESCO made a point of it in the inscription: social class, age, profession, religion, none of it filters who’s involved. In a town with a shrinking population — the municipality counted 42,134 people in 2022, down from 46,482 in 2004, with roughly 28,000 of them in the town itself — that’s most of the working adults in the place, building something for a night.
The sound of it is more specific than most people expect. Each barrio has a conga — a walking percussion group that pulls a crowd behind it through the streets — and separately a piquete, the small orchestra that plays the barrio’s polkas. Polkas, in Cuba, on Christmas Eve. It’s one of those survivals that makes more sense once you remember the tradition was already a century old before anything we’d now call Cuban popular music existed, and the “las parrandas de Remedios” simply kept what it had. The melodies belong to the barrio, they’re old, and people who grew up there can identify which side is coming down the street from two blocks away without seeing anything.
Ninety feet of plywood, wire and light
The centrepiece of each barrio’s effort is the trabajo de plaza. It began as modest carpentry set against the doors of the parish church, a Christmas decoration in the ordinary sense. It is no longer that. The trabajos now go up over ninety feet — more than twenty-five metres — and they’re assembled in the square with cranes in the week before Christmas Eve, then hidden until nine o’clock on the night.
They are not floats and they don’t move. They’re temporary architecture, illuminated from the inside, built on themes the barrio picks and guards. The second element, the carrozas, are the floats proper, and those come out later in the night, after midnight, carrying costumed figures who mostly stand still and let the thing be looked at.
The third element is fireworks, and this is where visitors tend to stop being tourists and start being slightly alarmed. The barrios lay out rocket lines three or four blocks long. One published figure puts a single run at around twenty thousand rockets. They’re fired at close range in a colonial square by people standing in it. There is no cordon in any sense a European festival would recognise. If you have opinions about crowd safety, hold them lightly and stand where the locals stand.
What actually happens, hour by hour at Las Parrandas de Remedios?
The wider festival period runs across the second half of December, but the night that matters is 24 December into the morning of the 25th, and it has a shape that hasn’t changed much.
It opens at five in the morning on the 24th with the diana — each barrio’s conga going through the streets with small fireworks, waking the town, which is the original 1820 gesture surviving as ritual. Through the afternoon, from about four or five, the two sides alternate hour by hour, firing mortars that escalate as the light goes. At nine the trabajos de plaza are revealed and stay lit until eleven. Midnight is the Misa del Gallo, the rooster’s mass, and the town pauses. After the mass the serious pyrotechnics start, and after those the carrozas come through. At six on Christmas morning there’s a final conga.
Here’s the part I find hardest to resolve, and I’m going to leave it unresolved because Cuban sources leave it unresolved. Granma describes that dawn conga as settling the contest — whichever way the crowd chooses to walk is the barrio that won. Juventud Rebelde, reporting on the 205th parranda in December 2025, states plainly that the competition ends with no winner declared and that the whole town wins. Both are published by Cuban national media within a day of each other. The likeliest reading is that there is no official verdict and both barrios go home certain they took it, which is a more durable arrangement than a scoreboard and probably explains why the thing has lasted two centuries.
The town on the other 364 days
Remedios out of season is quiet, low-slung and unusually intact, and it has one genuine oddity: its main square, Parque Martí, has two churches on it. The Iglesia del Buen Viaje sits on the north side, currently shut and leaking while it waits for repair authorisation. The other, the Iglesia Mayor de San Juan Bautista, is the reason to walk in.
It holds thirteen carved altars finished in gold leaf. They spent a long stretch of their life painted white — the town covered them to keep pirates from noticing what was in there — and the gold underneath was rediscovered during a restoration between 1944 and 1954, paid for by the Cuban philanthropist Eutimio Falla Bonet. It’s a small church in a small town with a gilded interior that would draw queues anywhere else.
Parque Marti and the Iglesia Mayor, Remedios, Cuba
There’s also a museum devoted entirely to the las parrandas de Remedios, in a nineteenth-century house, opened on 1 April 1980 and as far as anyone can tell the only one of its kind. Three rooms: the history, the music and lanterns — including the instruments of the piquete, the small orchestra that plays the polkas — and one room on pyrotechnics alone. Go there before the night rather than after. The scale models of past trabajos de plaza are what make the real ones legible.
The town’s age is contested, incidentally, and the contest is enjoyable. Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa founded it as Santa Cruz de la Sabana, and depending on which local historian you read that happened in 1513, 1514, 1515 or 1524. Remedios is conventionally listed as the eighth of Cuba’s original Spanish villas. Some historians in the town argue it’s actually the third-oldest European settlement on the island, behind only Baracoa and Bayamo, and has simply been miscounted for five hundred years. They will tell you about this.
If you were going to do it
Remedios is about fifty minutes from Santa Clara, which has the nearest airport and the nearest real infrastructure, and under an hour from the resort keys at Cayo Santa María and Cayo Las Brujas. That proximity is the practical answer to where people sleep, because the town itself runs on casas particulares — family houses — and there aren’t many of them.
Which is the reason this piece is published in August rather than November. A fixed date and a town of 28,000 is a bad combination for late planners. The rooms in Remedios itself go to people who booked them last year or who know somebody, and the fallback is a bed in Santa Clara plus a car that will still be available to bring you back at four in the morning on Christmas Day. That second half is the part people forget. The night doesn’t end at a civilised hour, and a driver who hasn’t agreed to it in advance won’t be there.
Worth knowing that Remedios isn’t the only option, either. Eighteen communities in central Cuba hold las parrandas de Remedios, and UNESCO’s listing notes they fall across the final months of the year rather than all landing on Christmas Eve. The others are smaller, harder to reach and far less documented in English, which for some people is the recommendation and for most people is the warning. Remedios is the one with a museum, a paved approach and somewhere to sleep within an hour.
Two other things worth knowing before you commit. The noise is not moderate — this is heavy artillery-grade percussion at close quarters for hours, and it is genuinely unsuitable for small children and for anyone who needs to be able to leave a crowd quickly. And the square is packed solid by the time the trabajos light up, so if you want to see them revealed rather than see the back of somebody’s head, you’re in position well before nine.
The honest part
You can see the problem for a festival whose entire spectacle is electrical. The trabajos de plaza are, structurally, enormous light fixtures, and the workshops that build them need power for months beforehand. Remedios has kept going through the worst of the crisis — the 205th las parrandas de Remedios went ahead on 24 December 2025 — and the president of the municipal assembly, Lilian Rojas Barrios, framed it publicly as cultural resistance rather than as a party. That is a fair description of what it costs the town to hold it now.
So the position stands: watch it, don’t book it. Marysol has been building Cuba itineraries out of Havana for eighteen years, and this is a night we’d argue for harder than almost anything else on the island once the conditions allow it — because it can’t be moved, can’t be staged for visitors, and doesn’t care whether anyone comes. When it makes sense to go, we’ll say so plainly. If you want to be told when that is, or you’re a trade partner planning years rather than months, get in touch through our contact page.
Links:
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage — Festivity of Las Parrandas in the centre of Cuba (inscribed 2018, file no. 01405): https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/festivity-of-las-parrandas-in-the-centre-of-cuba-01405
Municipality of Remedios, official portal — Museo de las Parrandas: https://www.nuestroremedios.gob.cu/museos/museo-de-las-parrandas