Guatemala's Fireworks and Feria Noise Calendar: 421 Ferias, and 22 Fall on December 8

In short: Guatemala runs 421 patron-saint ferias a year and they are not evenly spread. December carries 70 of them — 16.6% of the year in one month — and 22 land on 8 December alone, the day after the Quema del Diablo. There is no national quiet-hours law to appeal to, so the calendar is the only planning instrument that exists. This page is built from our own dataset and it tells you where the dates are not confirmed, too.

Anyone who has taken a client call from Guatemala has had this happen: the connection is fine, the laptop is fine, and then a sustained percussive noise starts outside that a headset cannot filter and a mute button cannot outlast. It is a feria, and it was on a calendar the whole time — just not one written for you.

The shape of the year

Source: this site’s ferias dataset, 421 rows, dataset verified 2026-03-08, rebuilt 2026-08-27, read 2026-09-17. Counts recomputed from the rows.

December is not merely the worst month; it is 1.6× the next-worst.

April’s apparent calm is a filing artefact, and it is worth being precise about it — the obvious explanation is wrong. Sixteen rows in the dataset are flagged movable, meaning the feast is set by Easter and has no fixed day. Those rows are still counted by month like every other row; they do not vanish from the totals. What they do is land somewhere, and the dataset puts them here:

So April shows 7 not because Semana Santa went uncounted, but because 11 of the 16 Semana Santa and other movable rows are filed under March — and the 2 that are in April sit inside that 7. Read the month table accordingly: part of March’s 40 is Semana Santa, and April is genuinely the thinnest month for fixed-date ferias while still being the week the country stops. The national holidays below are the thing that actually closes April.

The days to put in your calendar right now

These are the heaviest single calendar days — the count is how many ferias in the dataset carry that exact day. Because 143 rows carry no day at all, every number below is a floor, not a total.

If you do only one thing with this page: block 6–9 December and 19 March, and stop scheduling anything that matters on 25 July.

Why 6–9 December is one block, not two dates

7 December is the Quema del Diablo. As our Antigua festivals page describes it, “locals burn trash and old items in front of their homes at 6 PM — symbolically driving out evil before the Christmas season… it is something that happens throughout the city simultaneously.” It is not a venue event you can be somewhere else from. The dataset independently carries “La Quema del Diablo” as a December entry for both the Guatemala and Sacatepéquez departments.

8 December is then the single biggest feria day of the year, 22 towns at once. The two run into each other, and December 25 (8 more ferias) and the midnight fireworks of 31 December close out the month — the holidays dataset describes New Year’s Day itself as bringing “Fireworks at midnight, family gatherings, traditional tamales.”

Your town, specifically

Everything below is straight from the dataset, including the honesty flags. “month only” means the source carried no titular day and we are not inventing one.

Lake Atitlán — the towns stagger, and that is the opportunity

The lake is the best-behaved region on this page for a remote worker, because no two towns collide. If you are in Panajachel with a hard deadline in early October, the fix is a boat. Jaibalito and Santa Cruz’s other hamlets carry no rows of their own — the dataset is municipality-level, and Jaibalito sits inside Santa Cruz La Laguna, so read the Santa Cruz row for it. There is no separate Monterrico row either, for the same reason: it is inside Taxisco.

Sololá department overall carries 24 ferias, so there is more going on than the nine rows above.

Antigua and the valley — the problem is not Antigua

Sound carries across the Panchoy valley, so the towns you can hear are not only the one you live in. Every date below is a confirmed day unless marked otherwise.

A gap we are flagging rather than papering over: the ferias dataset carries no Antigua Guatemala row for Antigua’s own patron feria. The 25 July row above belongs to Santiago Sacatepéquez, a different municipality. Antigua’s Santiago Apóstol feria is carried instead in our holidays dataset, which dates it 2026-07-25 and describes its duration as "~1 week around July 25" with “processions, traditional dances, concerts, and cultural events throughout the colonial city center.” We have reported the gap for repair.

Sacatepéquez department carries 22 ferias in total.

Guatemala City

The holidays dataset adds the scale: the 15 August feria is “Guatemala City’s patron saint festival… the biggest urban feria in the country”, running "~2 weeks around August 15". A two-week disruption is not something you work around on the day.

Quetzaltenango (Xela)

A duplicate-key warning on this one. The dataset actually holds six Quetzaltenango rows under two municipality spellings — the four above under Quetzaltenango, plus a second Quetzaltenango (Xela) key that repeats Xelafer (as “Xelafer (Feria de la Independencia)”) and the Virgen del Rosario feria. So the city has six rows but only four distinct ferias. Same defect class as the duplicated department spellings noted below; reported for repair.

Xela is the hardest town on this page to plan around: four distinct ferias, not one with a confirmed day, in a department carrying 29 ferias — the second-highest in the country. The holidays dataset dates the independence feria to 2026-09-15 with a duration of "~2 weeks around September 15". Its description reads:

“Xela’s massive independence feria is one of the largest in Central America. Concerts, cultural events, parades, commercial exhibitions, and bull-riding events. The city transforms for two weeks.”

If you are in Xela, the first half of September is not a working fortnight.

Elsewhere

Chichicastenango’s Santo Tomás is the one to respect: the holidays dataset gives it 13–21 December, culminating on the 21st, “Includes the Palo Volador (flying pole dance), traditional dances, fireworks, and a massive market” — nine days, overlapping the 8 December peak’s tail.

Density by department

Feria count is a proxy for how often something is happening, not a ranking of loudness. We have measured nothing. With that stated:

Total: 421. ✓

Note on this table: the source file stores six departments under two spellings each — accented and unaccented — so a naive count under-reports Sacatepéquez, Sololá, Suchitepéquez, Totonicapán, Petén and Quiché. The figures above are the merged totals. The same defect appears at municipality level: Quetzaltenango is stored under both Quetzaltenango and Quetzaltenango (Xela), with two ferias duplicated across the two keys. We have reported both for repair.

The fixed national dates

These are separate from ferias and hit the whole country at once. All dates are 2026.

Source: this site’s holidays dataset, sourced to the Código de Trabajo and Decreto 1748, dataset lastUpdated 2026-02-24. Easter Sunday 2026: 5 April.

Ten full bank-closure days plus two half-days — the dataset labels the twelve dates together as totalClosedDays: 12, half-days included, so the twelve in that field is the same twelve rows in the table above, not twelve closures on top of the half-days. Its own note: “Banks typically close at noon on half-days. ATMs remain operational on all holidays.” Full detail on the holidays page.

Note also that Easter Sunday itself (5 April 2026) is not a holiday row — it is the reference date the other three hang off. The consecutive national holidays are the three before it: Thursday 2, Friday 3 and Saturday 4 April.

The law will not help you, and here is why

We researched this separately and published it in full: no national instrument sets an hour after which fireworks must stop. Our fireworks law page reads Decreto Ley 123-85, Acuerdo Gubernativo 28-2004 and DGAC’s RAC 101 and finds no curfew, no quiet-hours window and no decibel limit. The only clock in the pyrotechnics regulation bans night work inside a licensed factory between 18:00 and 06:00 — a labour rule for manufacturers, not a rule about when anyone may set off a cohete. And noise ordinances in Guatemala are municipal, so any rule that does exist binds only inside the municipality that passed it.

We did not obtain a municipal noise ordinance for Antigua, Panajachel or anywhere else, and none is quoted here.

The practical consequence is simple and worth stating plainly: there is nobody to complain to, so schedule around it instead. That is the entire argument for this page.

How to use this, practically

1. Find your municipality’s patron day in the tables above, and block the day before and the day after as well — the dataset’s multi-day runs (Chichicastenango 13–21 Dec, Cobán 1–6 Aug, San Pedro 27–30 Jun, Sololá 11–17 Aug, Flores 6–15 Jan) show ferias are rarely one day.
2. Hard-block 6–9 December, every year, everywhere in the country.
3. Check your neighbours, not just your town. The Sacatepéquez table exists because the feria you hear is often not yours.
4. If your town’s row says “month only”, that is a genuine unknown — ask a neighbour in the first week of that month, and treat the whole month as at-risk for planning purposes.
5. Remember the movable ones. Semana Santa moves every year; in 2026 Easter Sunday is 5 April and the Thursday-to-Saturday before it are national holidays.

What this page deliberately does not claim

• No decibel figures. Nothing was measured.
• No start times beyond the two our own published pages carry — the 6 PM Quema del Diablo start and midnight New Year fireworks. The “cohetes at 4 a.m.” claim you will hear is real folklore and unsourced data; it is not here.
• No invented days. 143 of 421 rows carry no day and are shown as month-only. The dataset’s own note explains why this matters: the day “used to default to 1, which published a fabricated date.”
• No loudness ranking of towns. Count is not volume.
• No year-specific feria dates. The ferias dataset carries recurring month/day; only the holidays table above is 2026-specific.

Related

• Are fireworks legal in Guatemala? — the law, in full
• Ferias patronales by department and month
• Guatemala holidays calendar
• Antigua festivals: month-by-month crowds and prices
• Coworking spaces in Guatemala — somewhere with walls, for the bad weeks
• Best cafés with WiFi in Antigua
• Internet speed in Guatemala by region

Sources

• This site’s ferias dataset, website/data/ferias/calendar.json — 421 rows, data_verified_on 2026-03-08, rebuilt_at 2026-08-27, read 2026-09-17. Published at /data/ferias/calendar.json.
• This site’s holidays dataset, website/static/data/holidays/2026.json — lastUpdated 2026-02-24, source: “Guatemalan Labor Code (Codigo de Trabajo), Decree 1748, and cultural calendar research”, read 2026-09-17.
• Are fireworks legal in Guatemala? — this site, 2026-08-11, sourced to Decreto Ley 123-85, Acuerdo Gubernativo 28-2004, Decreto 15-2009 and DGAC RAC 101.
• Antigua festivals — this site, for the Quema del Diablo 6 PM start.

Full capture ledger, including the dataset defects we found and every claim we deliberately left out: content/research/the-fireworks-and-feria-noise-calendar-2026-09-17.md.