4 Of Europe’s Most Bizarre Festivals To Attend This Summer

10.05.2024 - 15:21 / forbes.com / Cooper

In April, Cooper Wallace, a nine-year-old boy from the U.K., went viral after winning the final of the Gull Screeching Championship. Despite seeming niche, the event had a huge turnout of visitors from all over Europe and led to a peak in searches on Google for the tournament and its main vocal activity.

For those who missed the event, don’t despair. There are plenty more weird and wonderful European festivals coming up in 2024 that you can travel to. Here are four of the best, according to tour and activity booking site Hellotickets.

The Cotswold hills may be bucolic, but Gloucester's annual Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake is carnage. The event takes place on the U.K. bank holiday at the end of May and sees participants chase a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a steep incline.

The 3-4 kilogram round is launched down the 180-meter-long hill. The participant who crosses the finish line at the bottom first wins the cheese as a prize. Competitors are known to get injured so best just to be a spectator at this event.

The century-old tradition of El Salto del Colacho takes place every year during the celebration of Corpus Christi in the Spanish village of Castrillo de Murcia. It has its roots in religious and pagan folklore and dates back to the 17th century.

The participants are disguised as devils and run through the streets insulting and whipping villagers. They are chased by pious men attempting to drive them out. Particularly nailbiting is the moment when the devils jump over mattresses laid on the ground on which rows of newborn babies are lying. The idea is that the devil absorbs the children’s sins as he leaps over them.

Beyond its drama, the festival is deeply rooted in local culture and attracts crowds of spectators from nearby and far away who come to witness this extraordinary ritual.

The Wife Carrying Championship in Sonkajärvi, Finland, is a tournament in which male competitors race while each carrying a female partner. The participants must overcome a series of obstacles they encounter on the course like fences, sand and water troughs.

The event is inspired by a 19th-century legend about abducting women from villages. Now, the practice is consensual and the most important rule as laid down by the committee is to “have fun when carrying a wife.”

This year, the 37th edition of the Bog Snorkelling World Championship will take place on 25 August in Wales. Participants from nations around the world don snorkels, diving masks and flippers to navigate a 55-meter-long water-filled trench dug through a peat bog in the shortest time possible. The men's world record was set by Neil Rutter in 2023, with a time of 1 minute 12.34 seconds, smashing his 2018 record by nearly 6.5 seconds.