Gilroy Garlic Festival Association
Association / Organization · Gilroy ·
Gilroy Garlic Festival: garlic dishes, live music, cooking demos
Information
Gourmet Alley, Gilroy, CA 95020 Get directions
Gilroy Garlic Festival: garlic dishes, live music, cooking demos
Gourmet Alley, Gilroy, CA 95020 Get directions
"A long-running garlic festival in Gilroy that was founded in 1978 and became a local keystone has returned in a much smaller form: a three-day, 3,000-person event running July 25–27 on the five-acre South County Grove next to the Gilroy Gardens theme park. Tickets sold out within hours and are waitlisted, and organizers say it will feature the familiar food, music, and activities of past fests but on a reduced scale. The event follows a violent 2019 attack that wounded 17 and killed three, a 2020 COVID-19 hiatus, and smaller drive-thru and satellite events in subsequent years." - Paolo Bicchieri
"I learned that the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which ran for more than 40 years, was canceled indefinitely in April 2022; organizers cited a lack of revenue and gun violence in the community as reasons for the shutdown." - Paolo Bicchieri
"Beloved and long-running for more than four decades, the Gilroy Garlic Festival was announced canceled for the foreseeable future in April; organizers cited financial infeasibility following the pandemic and the 2019 mass shooting, in which a gunman killed three people and wounded 17 others." - Lauren Saria
"I followed the confusion around plans to carry on the Gilroy Garlic Festival after it was canceled indefinitely: the Noceti Group announced on Facebook that it would take on the garlic event, but an organizer from the original festival said they had never heard of or communicated with the asparagus festival folks; Tony Noceti later clarified to ABC7, “It’s gonna be a Garlic Festival, yes,” but said organizers won’t be using the Gilroy name, while the Gilroy Garlic Festival Association warned that any Stockton-based garlic events would not be “a sanctioned Gilroy Garlic Festival Association event” and insisted Stockton is not the successor to their community’s homecoming event in Gilroy, the Garlic Capital of the World." - Lauren Saria
"After organizers announced plans to cancel the popular annual event “indefinitely” in mid-April, I watched Bay Area residents lament the loss of one of Northern California’s stinkiest celebrations; while the big production is shelved, smaller replacement events the original organizers have put together — like the golf tournament scheduled for June 24 — are still set to run. I also noted that the festival’s association says it had no prior knowledge of outside groups claiming to revive the event, and that the community has been through enough without misinformation being spread in its name." - Paolo Bicchieri