How does Brazil mark Harvest and Gratitude?
Festas Juninas
- Local date
- June 24, 2027
- When is it?
- In June, around the three saints' days of St. Anthony, St. John, and St. Peter
Brazil's June festivals are not a single day but a whole month organised around the Catholic feast days of Saint Anthony, Saint John and Saint Peter: bonfires, quadrilha dancing, sweet and savoury dishes made from corn, and squares strung with bunting. Forró, the music at its root, was registered by IPHAN as Brazilian intangible cultural heritage in 2021, and cities in the Northeast treat the June season as the largest tourism and revenue window of their year. Religious calendar, agricultural calendar, and urban economy all stack up on the same dates.
What is this topic?
Whether the harvest becomes a holiday, and who gets to define it, is answered five different ways: the United States built a federal holiday around the family table; India's Pongal is timed by the Tamil calendar and the sun's entry into Capricorn, and the pot of rice is the rite itself; Brazil ties it to three saints' days in June; mainland China created a farmers' festival by State Council approval in 2018; and Japan rewrote a prewar imperial harvest rite into a national day for thanking labour.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.