Chile & Frijoles Festival

Each September the chile roasters turn on Union Avenue in Historic Downtown Pueblo. Growers set up along the street, and visitors buy bags of chiles after watching them roasted on the spot, along with dried chile, chile products and other produce sold straight from the farm. The organizers call the smell “our favorite aroma of Fall.” The festival runs three days on the third weekend after Labor Day. The Greater Pueblo Chamber of Commerce puts it on. The 32nd edition was held September 18–20, 2026, under the theme “Chile, Beans and American Dreams,” timed to Colorado’s 150th anniversary and America’s 250th.

Roasters on Union Avenue

Before the chiles reach the street, they spend months in fields across Pueblo County. Gary DiTomaso’s family began farming on the Mesa around 1904, and he has grown chile all his life. Chile has become his farm’s biggest seller. In 2026 a lack of water forced DiTomaso Farms to leave half its ground empty. The farm put its available water on its peppers, including a 10-acre patch of Pueblo chile.

“It’s all handpicked, and they bring it to the shed, and we put them on pallets and wrap them,” DiTomaso told KOAA. “Then we’ve got to put the pallets in the cooler, put them on a truck, take them down there and unload them — one bag at a time. A lot of hand labor.”

DiTomaso gives buyers a way to tell a Pueblo chile from other kinds. The Pueblo Mirasol grows upright on a straight stem. Varieties such as the Anaheim hang down and usually have curved stems. Mirasol means “looking at the sun.” Duane Nava, the Chamber’s president and CEO, said the festival exists to showcase the farmers and introduce visitors to the city’s signature crop. “Without our farmers, a lot of us don’t eat, right?” he said. DiTomaso expects the farm stands outside town to have one of their busiest weekends of the year while the festival is on.

Four tents, a fandango and a dog parade

The festival covers the Union Avenue district behind nine entrance gates, and the street is closed to cars. In 2026 more than 200 vendors sold food, crafts and local goods. One vendor’s offering, as the festival’s own page recorded it, was Italian sausage and green chilies. Four entertainment tents, presented by Mission Foods, ENSCO, Outpost Harley-Davidson and Pueblo Memorial Airport, carried dozens of local musical acts through the weekend. El Pueblo Fandango performed, and the El Pueblo History Museum presented Chile Academy stage events. In the Rocky Mountain SER Kids Corner, in the Angelo’s Pizza parking lot, the Saturday program ran from Jeannie’s Academy of Dance at 11 a.m. through Velma Segura, a mariachi singer, and Grupo Chicomecoatl, to the Miss Pueblo Scholarship Pageant at 4 p.m. Disgo’s Wild West Magic Show played several times on Saturday and Sunday. Students from Villa Bella Expeditionary school greeted visitors with handmade Pueblo Chile postcards. On Sunday the festival urged the crowd to wear Denver Broncos colors.

Sunday at 11 a.m. brings the Chihuahua & Friends Parade at the El Pueblo History Museum Stage. Costumes are encouraged, and gift baskets go to five dogs in five categories. In 2026 CHIP, the University of Colorado Boulder mascot, came down for it, and the festival called him “a new crowd favorite.” At 4 p.m. the Jalapeño Eating Contest begins in the Mission Foods tent near Alan Hamel Avenue and Main Street. It takes 20 contestants at $5 each and pays cash for first place, second place and judges’ choice. DiTomaso Farms supplied the 2026 jalapeños. Garrett Neughbauer took first, Nate Duncan second, and Kijuan Sloan judges’ choice. The festival posted a gallery of the contestants’ faces captioned “Just a little bit of regret.”

The cooking contest comes earlier in the week. The Chili & Salsa Showdown is judged blind on the Thursday before the festival at the Pueblo Convention Center. Every entry must be made from scratch with Certified Pueblo Green Chiles. Professional chefs from the American Culinary Federation sit on the panel with media people and community leaders. Winners for red chili, green chili and salsa are announced on the festival’s opening evening at the El Pueblo History Museum Stage.

Balloons at dawn, runners on Sunday

At 6:45 a.m. on each festival morning, weather permitting, 25 hot-air balloons inflate and launch from the Langoni Soccer Fields at 24th and High streets. Food and coffee trucks serve the crowd while they wait. The 2026 pilots came mostly from Colorado Springs and the Front Range, with others from Albuquerque, Los Lunas, Layton, Utah, and Columbia, Missouri. Ed Smith flew Hot Air Therapy out of Pueblo West. On Friday and Saturday evenings at 7:30, a few balloons, among them Greg Morrison’s Xfinity balloon, inflate and glow on the grassy knolls at South Main and Alan Hamel Avenue on the Riverwalk, just outside the festival’s main gate. The balloon events are free. They fly only in calm weather without storms or wind.

On the festival’s last morning in 2026, Southern Colorado Runners staged the revived Chile & Frijole Hot to Trot 5K and 10K. Both start and finish at Walter’s Brewing Company. The courses climb the Main Street Bridge, which is their one real hill, drop onto the Arkansas River Trail, pass Lake Runyon, run north along Phelps Creek, cross Fay’s Crossing Bridge, and return by the Riverwalk.

One grower, one roaster, 1994

Rod Slyhoff, then president and CEO of the Chamber, founded the festival to promote a new civic slogan, “Experience the Flavor of Pueblo,” with the Pueblo chile at its center. A 2020 article on the Pueblo Chile Growers Association’s site, marking 25 years, dates the first festival to September 1994. It ran two days. The association’s own history timeline gives the launch as September 15, 1995. Rocky Mountain PBS, citing the Chamber, gives 1994.

“That first year, we saw somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people attending the festival,” Slyhoff said. “We had one food vendor, one chile grower and roaster, one produce farmer, and a few artisans selling their goods. It was small, but we felt like it was successful enough that we could try again the following year.”

DiTomaso was there in the first year as a visitor. He brought a chile roaster the next year and has come back every year since. People he met at the festival now come to his farm’s market. “A lot of people come, ‘Hey, I bought chile last year,’ and I’ll remember them, and they remember me,” he said. “We make a lot of friends.”

The festival first covered a couple of downtown blocks. By 2020 it filled 10 or more blocks of Union Avenue, with nearly 200 vendors and five venues for more than 60 local acts, and drew an estimated 140,000 people. “Agritourism is a buzzword now, but it wasn’t back when we started the festival,” Slyhoff said. The growers organized around the festival as well. The Pueblo Chile Growers Association formed in 2015, the chile got a Colorado license plate in 2017, and it reached Whole Foods Markets in 2019. After the 2026 festival the Chamber put attendance at more than 100,000 and the spending it brings the city at an estimated $8 million. “It’s a celebration of who we are,” said Krystle Herrera, a Chamber spokesperson.

The frijoles in the name

The beans have their own claim. Pueblo County is a major contributor to Colorado’s dry bean crop, which is mostly pintos. Colorado ships more than $30 million in beans a year. Ryan Froman manages Rusler Produce, a pinto grower in Avondale, and dates the local crop to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. “Because frijoles are legumes, they make a great rotation crop with corn and chiles and help keep our soil healthy,” he said, “and they require less water than many other crops and have a relatively short growing season.”