California Avocado Festival

At half past five on the Friday of the first weekend in October, the honorary chairs of the California Avocado Festival set an avocado on the nose of the seal at Carpinteria’s Seal Fountain, and the festival is declared open. In 2026 the chairs were Cecilio and Mary Marquez of Rancho Santa Cecilia. Their family farm has worked the Carpinteria foothills for 20 years, growing Hass, Bacon, Fuerte, McArthur, Reed and Zutano avocados, which they sell with exotic fruits at the Carpinteria Thursday Farmers Market. The 2026 festival, held October 2 through 4, was the 40th.

Four stages on Linden Avenue

The festival takes over Linden Avenue between Carpinteria Avenue and 6th Street, in the middle of downtown. Admission is free. The organizers describe it as one of only a few community festivals still run in the heart of a downtown. Friday begins at 1 p.m. as the Locals Block Party, which is open to all. Saturday and Sunday open at 11 a.m. and close at 10 p.m. and 6 p.m.

Music runs on four stages: the Main Stage, the Seal Stage, the Grotto Stage and a Youth Stage presented by the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation and programmed by Roll N Rock 805. The 2026 lineup had more than 60 bands. Doublewide Kings, Cornerstone and Out of the Blue played the Main Stage on Friday night, Skamakazie closed the Grotto, and East Valley Road played the Seal Stage until 11. On Sunday the Main Stage ended with Redfish, 4:40 to 6:00. The festival fills its 60 band slots from more than 150 applicants and gives local bands priority.

Along the street stand about 50 arts-and-crafts and commercial booths, about 15 food vendors, and more than a dozen local nonprofits raising money. The organizers estimate attendance at approximately 40,000 over the weekend. The city’s visitor page gives 30,000 to 40,000. Noozhawk, citing the organizers, reported that the 2019 festival drew more than 80,000.

Ice cream, tri-tip and a ten-pound bag

Food vendors put avocado in nearly everything. Rori’s Ice Cream, the festival’s official ice cream sponsor, makes its avocado flavor from scratch in the week before the festival. Other 2026 offerings included deep-fried avocado, avocado sushi burritos and Dave’s Dogs’ SB Dog topped with avocado. The nonprofit booths sell food too. Carpinteria High School cheerleaders make guacamole, the Lions Club serves tri-tip sandwiches, the Carpinteria Surf Club pours root beer floats and the Rotary Club sells snow cones. Brander Vineyards wine and Kona Big Wave Golden Ale are poured all weekend.

The Strong Arm Contest starts at noon Saturday on the Seal Stage. Competitors hold a bag of avocados for as long as they can. The rules require a straight arm, a fist with the palm down, and the arm at a right angle to the body. Adults 14 and older hold 10-pound bags. In 2026 a youth division was added for those 13 and under, who hold 5-pound bags, and its first prize was unlimited Ferris wheel rides. The festival’s site and press release give the host as John Palmentari, Coastal View News as John Palminteri. Roy Lee and Gregg Carty judge.

Also new in 2026 was an avocado costume contest on the Youth Stage, with prizes for most unique, most avocado-inspired, and best family or group costume. The festival’s posts set it at 1:15 p.m. Saturday. The schedule and press release give 1:20, and the release names Jeff Thiemer of the festival board as host. On Saturday evening from 6 to 7 the Youth Stage becomes the Glowcado Grove, a dance party run by the Boys & Girls Club, and children are handed glow sticks.

On Sunday at 11:30 a.m. the Guacamole Contest is held in the Grotto Tent. Catherine Remak of K-LITE 101.7 and Festival Director Olivia Sorgman host. Entries are judged on presentation, taste and texture, and a pint is the recommended minimum. Trophies go for best guacamole, best presentation and honorable mention. At noon the Future Farmers of America auction follows in the same tent. Bidders compete for avocado trees from Brokaw Nursery, the festival’s largest avocados, Brander wine and gift baskets, with proceeds going to local FFA students.

The Bliss Family Expo Tent covers the crop itself, with agricultural displays, grafting demonstrations and accounts of the families who grew avocados in the valley. The festival’s About page calls it the George Bliss Expo Tent. Board treasurer Emily Miles has overseen it since joining the board in 2012 as the representative of the valley’s growers, packers and shippers. Her grandfather planted the first commercial orchard in the Toro Canyon area in 1922. George and Margie Bliss were honorary chairs in 2000.

Children under 5 ride the Ferris wheel free, courtesy of Endwell Hospitality, the group reviving the old Palms restaurant downtown. Other children’s activities include face painting, games, tables from the Carpinteria Children’s Project and Kinderkirk, and a free parkour course from Santa Barbara Trapeze.

Each year’s poster is chosen by contest. The 2026 design, unveiled August 27 at the farmers market on Linden Avenue, was painted by Elektra Caffrey, a 24-year-old computer scientist. She modeled it on vintage National Park and travel posters and drew a crate of avocados leading the eye into the landscape.

Wine at a Chamber table

Debbie Murphy, a founding organizer, told Coastal View News the festival began with “some Chamber of Commerce friends sitting around a table, drinking wine.” Murphy was then chair of the Chamber of Commerce. In her account the idea took shape in the early 1980s, when local nonprofits were struggling for money and the group wanted a fundraiser for many organizations instead of one. “Pretty soon the California Avocado Festival was invented,” she said. It was probably more than one bottle of wine, she added.

The festival’s own account places the founding meeting in 1986 and names Rob Godfrey, Connie Korbel, Debbie Murphy, Fran Puccinelli, Bob Ealee and John Franklin. Murphy remembers it differently. In her version Godfrey, Korbel, Ealee and Julian Jordan were in the earliest talks, and Franklin joined later. She credits Fran Puccinelli with insisting on attractive signage and handcrafted merchandise.

The group considered other themes but settled on avocados. The organizers state that Santa Barbara County is the third-largest avocado producer in North America and that Carpinteria is a major contributor. They chose October because, they say, it is one of the sunniest months, with the least rain. Murphy says they named it for the state on purpose: “We wanted to claim the event for the state.”

To learn how to close streets and run a festival, Murphy went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Its organizers had published a small guide to producing a festival, and the Carpinteria group used it as a manual. “We questioned every single decision in order to plan for all contingencies,” she recalled. They also learned to let volunteers choose their own work. The Kiwanis organized runs, school groups sold avocado brownies, and the high school cheerleaders took on the guacamole booth. Local growers set trees aside so the cheerleaders could pick their own avocados. Keith Puccinelli designed the posters for 15 years. “We never gave him any input,” Murphy said. “He just brought us his design and we would run with it.” His original avocado logo is still in use.

Sweet chaos on the bluffs

At the first festival, Murphy was more than nine months pregnant with her son Zack. Shuttle riders came in through a single gate on Eighth Street, where organizers tried to collect a $1 admission. Locals simply walked in. Volunteers worked a dirt parking lot on the bluffs in heat and dust. “Sweet chaos,” Murphy called it. “Oddly, the first festival we barely had any avocados,” she said. She thinks people expected large bags of avocados just for coming. Only one or two vendors at the far end sold the fruit, though food vendors had to put some avocado in or on their dishes.

Murphy recalls other lessons from the early years. She placed a group of Peruvian flute players beside the Lions Club’s tri-tip booth, and after a weekend of the same music she was not sure the Lions would speak to her again. One year an Oxnard boxing club staged matches in a ring behind Ninth Street, and some boxers kept fighting after they left the ring. Bob Ealee got thoroughly sick at an avocado pie-eating contest after about five pies. “That was not a contest to win,” Murphy said. A high school student volunteered to wear the California Avocado Commission’s avocado costume. Two women pulled him into a bar and made off with it, and he was left standing in his tights.

A store owner confronted Murphy a couple of weeks before one festival, sure it would ruin his weekend sales. During the festival, she said, “he was ecstatic as he was having the best weekend of his store’s history.” By the second year, in her words, “it was just Carpinteria’s party.” Another year featured a screening of “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death,” and the audience came in jungle attire.

The Guacamole Express

Carpinteria had no regular passenger train service between 1958 and 1997. From 1989 through 1991, festival organizers arranged for Amtrak to make special Carpinteria stops on what they called the Guacamole Express. Historian Sara Killen found the episode while researching a talk for the Carpinteria Valley Museum of History, given September 25, 2026. Riders came from as far as Paso Robles and Los Angeles. Carpinterians could take a bus to the Santa Barbara station, board the train and ride home to the festival. One year the Main School PTO met the Carpinteria passengers with a pancake breakfast. Killen found few personal photographs of the festival from the 1980s and 1990s, and she has asked residents to bring theirs to the museum.

The festival has been canceled twice. The 2020 edition was called off for the pandemic. The 35th festival, set for October 2 and 3, 2021, was postponed to 2022 because of capacity concerns and the changing course of COVID-19. “We are committed to providing a family-friendly free festival to the public and we were faced with challenges again this year that did not make it feasible or safe to move forward,” the board wrote at the time. It came back in 2022.

The festival is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. A volunteer board runs it with one part-time staff member. The festival’s site puts the number of volunteers it needs at more than 200, and its recruiting posts at more than 150. Co-president Gary Dobbins started as a volunteer 35 years ago and is co-publisher of Coastal View News. Co-president Mike Lazaro, the director of production and operations, has worked 33 of the festivals. Vice president Melissa Brown Simpson, a fifth-generation Carpinterian, is the festival’s first female vice president. Local nonprofits raise about $100,000 over the weekend. The festival’s site says it gives more than $15,000 a year in grants, and its 2026 press release says more than $20,000. Over four decades, by the organizers’ count, about 1.4 million people have come, more than 400,000 avocados have been eaten and 2,900 band sets played, and 24 miles of extension cord have powered the event.

Murphy has attended every festival. She remembers two rules from the beginning. The first: “Whoever shows up was invited.” The second: by the Monday after the festival, there should be no evidence it was ever there.