Masskara Festival - October
Bacolod city, Panay Province
Bacolod City never seems to lose its luster, especially when MassKara Festival celebration comes.
MassKara is a festival for local and international tourism. It is intended to provide a venue for the activities and cultural expression.
The MassKara Festival carnival spirit fills the air as masked participants donning fabulous costumes dance there way around the city's main thoroughfares. This annual event reflects Bacolenos' love for fun and gaiety. Coinciding with the city's character day celebration, the MassKara Festival features carnivals, fairs, and madri-gras style street dancing.
MassKara Festival festivities kick off with food fairs, mask-making contests, brass band competitions, beauty and talent pageants, a windsurfing regatta, drinking and eating contests, trade fairs and exhibits.
Prizes are given away for the best masks and there is fierce, yet friendly competition between the participants.
Conceptualized in the 1980's to enliven the celebration of the founding day of the city, the Masskara Festival flaunts the festive spirit of the Negrenses inspite of the slump in the sugar industry.
Aptly symbolized by a smiling mask, the MassKara Festival succeeds in alluring tourists and sightseers, boosting the city's tourism. Thousands flock to Bacolod in time for the fun-filled week-long festival to join in the merriment.
Everyone joins the partying, and merrymaking with the mask-making, greased-pig
catching and pole climbing contests, sack races, and other Filipino fiesta
games and that’s why Bacolod City is known as the the "City
of Smiles".
The climax of the MassKara
Festival is a mardi-gras parade where revellers don elaborate mask and
costumes and dance to Latin rhythms Rio de Janiero style.
The term Masskara is coined from two words: mass, meaning crowd and the Spanish word cara, for face; thus the double meaning for "mask" and "many faces"
Throughout the week of the MassKara Festival, people from all over the Visayas, flock to the town plaza. They join Bacoleños in the non-stop round of festivities. Even if you don't feel like dancing and singing!
The MassKara Festival is a festival of masks that is a feast for the eyes that excites and invigorates.
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