Avocado Festival

Main Avenue on a Sunday in April

On festival Sunday the road into Fallbrook runs past avocado groves, which the Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce notes are visible to everyone driving through the rural town. In town, Main Avenue is closed to cars, and vendors line it from Fallbrook Street to East Mission Road. In a typical year there are about 450 of them, by the count of chamber CEO Lila MacDonald, selling “everything from food and beverages to solar panels.” A pennant hangs on the booths that carry avocado products. The tables hold whole avocados next to avocado-themed gifts. At the 2025 festival a Coast News photographer caught a bee working an avocado-themed backpack as if it were the fruit.

Admission is free, and the day runs from 9 to 5. Organizers estimated about 100,000 people at the 38th annual festival in April 2025, and the chamber says that figure has been the average for many years. By the chamber’s day-of zip code research, about 38 percent of visitors live outside San Diego County. Some come from Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, and Los Angeles counties, and some from as far as the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Northwest. Fallbrook sits in the inland hills near Interstate 15, which is called the “Avocado Highway,” and the town is often called the “avocado capital of the world.” Many Main Avenue merchants open their shops that Sunday. Shuttles run from outlying lots, with a major stop on the north side of Fallbrook Union High School, off Stage Coach Lane.

Guacamole at Main and Alvarado

The contests are held at the Community Stage in the Village Square, at Main and Alvarado. The Guacamole Contest gives prizes for Best Tasting and Best Presentation in an amateur and a professional division. The same stage hosts Little Miss & Mister Avocado, a contest for the best-dressed avocado, and the Avocado 500, a children’s car race the chamber also calls the Avo 500. Between contests, local youth groups, musicians, dancers, and singers perform. In 2025 many visitors came in costume for the “Awesome Avocado Attire Contest.”

The Main Stage stands at the south end of the festival at Main and College, beside Scrappy’s Tire. The beer and wine garden there is open from 10 to 5 to adults 21 and over who show government ID and wear a wristband. The Avocado Holding Competition is held inside it. Bands play from the same stage; The Way Brothers announced an 11:30 a.m. set there for the 2026 festival on April 19.

The food runs to the avocado. Holy Guaca-Moly booths hand out samples, and in 2025 a woman named Priscilla was photographed passing them out. There is avocado ice cream, a farmers market, an agricultural area, avocado cooking demonstrations, and agricultural displays along the streets.

Alvarado Street between Main and Vine holds the Artisan Walk, where MacDonald counted 30 to 35 artists selling handmade crafts. The Art of the Avocado contest, backed by Fallbrook Propane Gas Co., is shown during the festival. In 2025 Lori Beach took first place in photography, Kim Fiori in two-dimensional work, and Mary Brockman in three-dimensional work. The chamber’s special selection, Celeste Weber, was to be invited to design the artwork for the next year’s festival logo.

The caboose and the museums

West of Main on Alvarado is the Fallbrook Gem & Mineral Museum. At Main and Elder is the Railroad Heritage Park, where a historic caboose stands as a reminder of the town’s railroad. For the 2022 festival the Fallbrook Historical Society opened the caboose for tours and set up a booth beside it. The chamber names the society’s museum and the gem museum as the places where the festival’s farming heritage is most visible.

Pioneer Days and the train from Los Angeles

The railroad is part of an older story. Members of the Fallbrook Historical Society told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2009 that an earlier celebration called Pioneer Days ran in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. A 1956 program at the society’s museum off Rockycrest Road calls that year’s event the “12th annual,” which places the first in 1945.

Bev McDougal moved to Fallbrook in 1960. She remembered a weekend of parades and rodeos for tourists, and the train from Los Angeles arriving to residents who handed boxed lunches to the travelers. “It was a big event — the whole town turned out to meet the train and get involved with the parade,” she said. No one interviewed in 2009 could say clearly how Pioneer Days ended. Its last edition had passed before the Avocado Festival began, and it did not directly lead to the later event.

The farms changed in those years too. Darwin East, who had lived in Fallbrook for 50 years, recalled that the 1950s had more truck crops such as strawberries, with cattle and chicken ranches in the hills. “It was probably more diverse agriculturally than it is now – now it’s mostly avocados and flowers,” he said. East started East Brothers Grove Services in January 1968, when avocado trees were being planted all over. He put the peak at about 83,000 acres of avocados and the 2009 figure at “about 53,000, something like that.” In his account, development had taken over most of the farmland in town.

A newcomer’s street fair, 1987

The festival as it runs now began in 1987, when Carol Eastman, new to Fallbrook, suggested a street fair with a theme. It was first held in autumn. Eastman said it had to move to spring because avocados are more plentiful in April than in October. Some years before 2009 she took the idea of avocado ice cream to Cold Stone Creamery. “They looked at me like I was nuts,” she said. In 2009 the ice cream was sold at Cold Stone’s booth off Fig Street, next to Wells Fargo.

Bob Leonard, then executive director of the chamber, said that year’s new foods were an avocado tamale and deep-fried avocados. He followed the crowds over the years. “By ‘95, we were doing about 20,000 people,” he said. “Subsequent to that, I think it would have been ‘97, we added some additional TV spots we had never done, and the attendance jumped to 40,000.” By 2009 attendance had held at 70,000 for six years, and the 23rd festival that April was expected to draw the same, with more than 350 vendors. About 60 members of the senior sheriff’s patrol volunteered, along with others who set up tents and tables and cleaned the streets afterward. Leonard was proud that 56 of the vendors in 2008 represented charitable groups.

Eastman said she was surprised at how large it had grown. “I think it’s the idea that it’s a themed festival, whereas in Carlsbad, Encinitas and Oceanside — they’re just your basic street fairs,” she said. “Here, you can pick up recipes and see what people are doing with avocados.”

The empty April of 2020

The festival set for April 19, 2020, was canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak. MacDonald said the event cost the chamber about $75,000 to stage and was not a large moneymaker for it. “We do it because it brings a lot of money into our local economy,” she said. “Some businesses can do two to three days of work in one day.” Michelle Shearer, who sells handmade jewelry, counted the festival as her second-biggest show of the year and the source of about 15 percent of her business’s yearly income. “I know some crafters, this is how they pay the bills,” she said. She still backed the cancellation: “Our community and our safety come first.”

The festival could not be moved later in the year. MacDonald said the avocado season lasts only until July, and a fall date would fall out of season and run into the chamber’s Harvest Festival. Instead she started a Facebook group, “Avocado Festival Virtual Shopping,” so that vendors could keep selling without the street. The festival returned. KPBS listed the April 19, 2026, edition as the 39th annual, and the chamber has set the next one for Sunday, April 18, 2027.