Swallows Day Parade and Mercado Street Fair

At ten o’clock on parade morning the streets of downtown San Juan Capistrano close. At eleven the Swallows Day Parade steps off from the corner of El Camino Real and Ortega Highway, and nothing in it runs on an engine. Every entry is foot-powered or horse-drawn: marching bands, equestrian groups, horse carriages, wagons, horse-drawn floats, community groups, folklórico dancers. The San Juan Capistrano Fiesta Association, which puts it on, calls it one of the nation’s largest non-motorized parades. The 67th annual parade is set for Saturday, March 20, 2027, the day after St. Joseph’s Day, when the swallows are said to come back to Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Down Ortega Highway behind the horses

The route is 1.6 miles. The Orange County Register’s preview of the 2026 parade traced it from El Camino Real along Ortega Highway to Del Obispo, then down and around to Camino Capistrano, ending just past La Zanja. The parade runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and costs nothing to watch.

Horses set the pace, and they leave things behind. For the 2026 parade the association recruited a “Fiesta Posse” of groups of three or four to walk ahead of each band with a shovel, a broom, and a bin. Crews were invited to dress as rodeo clowns, elves, chickens, or whatever suited them, with an award for the best style. The organizers estimated that each crew would meet fewer than 20 piles along the route.

The association’s safety page reminds spectators that a horse generally weighs over 1,000 pounds and can panic and run without notice. It advises never to go behind one with less than eight feet between horse and person, and never to touch one without permission. Fiesta volunteers along the route wear black and white. The association’s president, Jim Taylor, is known to walk out into the street mid-parade and interview the participants.

The 2026 entries included the Anza Trail Color Guard, volunteers of the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail. The Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation, took first place for horse-drawn non-profit float, and the tribe credited its member Amanda Pierce with the float’s making. Winners of the association’s February Pet Parade, children with their household pets, birds, and barnyard animals, march together as one entry. In 2025 the Budweiser Clydesdales made their second appearance: an eight-horse hitch pulling the red beer wagon, with the Dalmatian that travels with each hitch.

Grand marshals have come mostly from horse country. Robert Ridland, a jumping equestrian at the 1976 Olympics, led the 2023 parade. In 2025 it was Kathy Holman, who has owned and run Ortega Equestrian Center since 1980 and took in horses their owners thought dangerous. “The secret to their rehabilitation is to give them a job, lots of love, and brush them till they shine – then they will work their heart out for you,” she said in a statement on the association’s website. Donna and Ken Friess followed in 2026.

For 2027 the association named the Stroscher Ranch family, marking 140 years in town. Born in 1856, Wilhelm Stroscher became William Stroschein when he immigrated from Prussia. He married Frederica in the German settlement of Anaheim, and in 1887 the couple moved to San Juan Capistrano with a newborn daughter. They bought the orchard across the street from the Mission ruins and lived in the Miguel Parra Adobe until their house went up at the northeast corner of El Camino Real and Old Mission Road. William grew walnuts, served as a director of the Capistrano Water Company, and led the conversion of the town’s irrigation from dirt ditches to cement-lined channels. He died in 1915. Frederica outlived him by 40 years, switched the orchard to oranges, and helped found the town’s first Protestant church. Their son Carl, the last constable of San Juan Township, built the “Little Yellow House” at El Camino Real and Father O’Sullivan Way to be near her. Their youngest, Herbert, a dentist, took over the orchard after she died in 1955.

The Mercado in Historic Town Center Park

Just off the route, the Mercado Street Faire opens at 9 a.m. in Historic Town Center Park, 31872 El Camino Real, and runs until 5 p.m. It operates before, during, and after the parade. “Howdy Y’all!” begins the welcome from Michelle Erca, the association’s first vice president and Mercado chair. “It is THE place to be after the parade and goes all day long!”

A country western band and a DJ play for dancing through the afternoon. There is beer and wine, along with tacos, burgers, gyros, and sweet treats. Culture OC counted about 100 vendors in 2025, selling jewelry, gifts, country western goods, cowboy hats, kebabs, and more. The kids’ play zone fills part of the park with games and inflatables.

Most visitors arrive without a car. From the San Juan Capistrano Metrolink station, the association says, a rider walks straight up to the traffic light and is in the middle of the event. A free shuttle runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. from two lots on Rancho Viejo Road, east of Interstate 5 at the Junipero Serra exit. It drops passengers at the Old Fire Station site, at El Horno and La Matanza streets. The city runs special-event trolleys as well.

From a school carnival to a month of fiestas

The parade began in the 1930s as a carnival at San Juan Elementary School, held to celebrate the swallows’ return. The carnival became a local equestrian parade, run by a committee of the San Juan Capistrano Business Council, later the Chamber of Commerce. The first program was an equestrian parade, a trail ride, and a western dance. The parade eventually grew large enough that the Fiesta Committee, now the Association, took its own identity. Culture OC dates the first official Swallows Day Parade to 1954. The association’s Instagram reads “Celebrating SJC since 1961,” the year, according to its own history page, that the city incorporated.

Since 1987 other civic groups have joined the association to make a month-long Fiesta de las Golondrinas, the Festival of the Swallows. In 1995 the city named the association lead coordinator, with approval rights over every Fiesta event. The season now runs from winter into March. It includes the Taste of San Juan at San Juan Hills Golf Club, the El Presidente Ball, an old west melodrama in the park where the audience boos the villain, Hoos’ Gow Day, and Frog Jumping. For the Hairiest Man contest, men sign up clean-shaven about nine weeks ahead, stop shaving, and are judged at Fiesta Grande at the Swallows Inn. The 2025 champion was Matt Sheedy. Volunteers who work three events receive a deputy’s badge. Each spring the City Council gives the season its “Blessing,” and one year Mayor Troy Bourne was handed a Fiesta belt buckle for approving it.

The run broke in 2020 and 2021, when COVID-19 canceled the parade. It returned in 2022, but an equine brain virus outbreak meant motorized vehicles were temporarily allowed. The horses came back in 2023. “We survived Covid and an Equine Virus over the past few years,” Taylor wrote on the association’s site, thanking the “numerous local corporate sponsors who did not request a refund when the parade was cancelled.” Karen Stine, the parade chair, credits the community’s involvement and the city’s support. “It really does bring the community together and it represents our history,” she told Culture OC.

A pastor, a hotelkeeper, and the swallows

The cliff swallows come from Goya, Argentina, over 6,000 miles away, Culture OC reported. Stine said they gather their nest materials from San Juan Creek near the Mission. “I happen to live here (by) San Juan Creek and I get to see them and hear them every year,” she said. The Mission’s own account says the birds are said to leave for Goya in October and return each March. It says the celebration began centuries ago, when Mission padres noticed that the return roughly coincided with St. Joseph’s Day, March 19. The Mission also credits Father St. John O’Sullivan, its pastor from 1910 to 1933, with starting its St. Joseph’s Day tradition in the 1920s.

The local historian Phil Brigandi traced the story through print. In 1862 the Los Angeles Star noted swallows nesting “in their usual number, on our Court House.” In 1892 a writer in the Santa Ana Blade saw that “The horizon is black with swallows in the vicinity of old ruins.” The punctual March 19 arrival does not seem to appear in print until 1924. That spring the Santa Ana Register reported that in 1921 the birds “arrived in a body on the morning of the nineteenth and one of them flew into church during mass.” That year, 1924, the swallows were late, arriving on April Fools’ Day.

O’Sullivan, Brigandi writes, popularized the story while struggling to raise money to restore the Mission. It is absent from O’Sullivan’s own Little Chapters About San Juan Capistrano (1912) and from Father Zephyrin Engelhardt’s 1922 history. It first appears in book form in Charles Francis Saunders’ Capistrano Nights (1930), written from notes O’Sullivan supplied around 1927. In that telling O’Sullivan passes the new hotel on the west side of the plaza, which Brigandi presumes was the Hotel Capistrano, built in 1920. He finds the proprietor smashing swallows’ nests under the eaves with a long pole. The Mission’s version makes the man a shopkeeper with a broomstick. In both, the man calls the birds a nuisance. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” he says when asked where they can go. O’Sullivan answers: “Then come on, swallows, I’ll give you shelter. Come to the mission, there’s room enough there for you all!” The next morning, by Saunders’ account, they were building under the eaves of the restored sacristy of Father Serra’s church.

The early versions say nothing of advance “scouts” or of the traditional departure date, October 23, the feast of St. John of Capistrano. Within a year or two the story was national news. By the 1930s it was in newspapers around the world and on the radio. In 1939 Leon René made it a song, and on March 19 the Mission still has “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano” sung with mariachi. The Fiesta Association set its 2026 Farewell to the Swallows BBQ for October 23.

O’Sullivan named a source for some of the stories: José de Gracia Cruz, known as Acú, the Mission’s old bellringer, who lived from 1844 to 1924. Acú told him the birds wintered in Jerusalem. When the padre asked how they crossed the ocean without tiring, Acú replied: “You see, padre, they carry with them in their beaks a little twig of a tree, and when they get tired flying across the ocean they put the twig on the water and alight upon it and rest themselves.”