Pirates Week
Festival
Taste of Cayman
Cook-Off
Fishing Tournament
Batabano Carnival
Queen's Birthday

Annual Events in the Cayman Islands

Batabano

Visitors in late April will witness our Batabano festival when Spring is ushered in with a colourful parade of costumes, music and dancing. You can join the costume street parade where local groups and schools have let their imaginations go wild. Usually designed with a tropical theme, the bands range from dancing flowers to swimming stingrays. Local bands playing island music fill the streets and dance groups and school children move and groove. You'll find it hard not to join in the fun!

Batabano was launched by the Rotary Club in 1984 and is undoubtedly one of the main highlights of Cayman's entertainment calendar. The event is an annual affair and is usually held after Ash Wednesday.

Carnival is a communal celebration of life, as much a part of the Caribbean life as the palm trees and the beaches. Its roots mirror our diverse history.

Batabano is Cayman's carnival and, appropriately, the name has a distinctly local flavour. Cayman of yesteryear was a turtling island: the waters surrounding the islands were full of turtles, which provided meat for food and shells for decoration or functional uses. "Batabano" is the word given to the tracks left by turtles when they drag themselves onto the beach to nest in the sand.
The heart and soul of Batabano is the Mas' (Masquerading) Bands who get the opportunity to express creativity, imagination and talent, sometimes through the interpretation of a social issue.

While many of the costumes have been traditionally inspired by Cayman's magnificent marine environment with interpretations ranging from the regal mantra rays to the anemones, designers have begun to utilize their costumes to comment on social issues both locally and worldwide. Depictions in the past have covered the millennium bug, the world's refugee crisis and drug abuse.

Design and choreography become more elaborate each year. It is a time to celebrate your surroundings, to display creativity, to voice social issues and of course, to party and unite.