Fiesta Grande of Chiapa de Corzo
15 January 2026 — Shake, shake! The parachico dances under the stars – join me!
The Fiesta Grande in Chiapa de Corzo, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, takes place every January, with the main days falling around 15 to 23 January. Its best-known figures are the parachicos: men in carved wooden masks, fibre wigs and colourful shawls, who dance through the streets shaking a metal rattle called a chinchín. The festival blends devotion to saints within the local Catholic tradition with community customs: processions, music, food and ritual performances. A popular legend links the dances to help for a sick child, but it is a tale and should not be taken as established history. In 2010 UNESCO inscribed “Parachicos in the traditional January feast of Chiapa de Corzo” on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The festival follows fixed calendar dates rather than lunar phases. January nights are long and often clear, and the stars add to the memory of the processions.
Flying across the sky: An ethereal, bluish-silver figure made of luminous dots and thin connecting lines, like a constellation moving across the night sky, shaped as a dancer with a carved mask outline, a long fibre wig of trailing star-threads and a rattle shaking in one hand
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