The famed Gilroy Garlic Festival will return this summer after a five-year absence, the Gilroy Garlic Festival Association announced this afternoon.

The 2025 version will be on a smaller scale – about one-tenth of the previous festival’s big crowds – and at a different location – the Gilroy Gardens amusement park instead of Gilroy’s Christmas Hill Park.

But its sponsors say visitors will be able to savor the signature garlic dishes, live entertainment and arts and crafts familiar to previous festival visitors.

The Gilroy Gardens event, scheduled for July 25-27, will have a limited capacity of just 3,000 pre-sold tickets per day.

“We are grateful for the continued support of the Gilroy community, City of Gilroy, Gilroy Gardens, and our dedicated partners who have helped make this return possible,” the festival association announced. Additional event details, including ticket information and programming, will be announced in the coming weeks.

The event will be held at the South County Picnic Grove at Gilroy Gardens and will require a separate entry from the theme park. Tickets must be purchased in advance; no tickets will be available for purchase at the gate on the day of the event.

The last festival in 2019 ended in a stunning and violent tragedy, when a lone teenaged gunman shattered the peace of the festival’s closing hours with a barrage of automatic weapon fire, killing three people and wounding 17 others before killing himself in a shootout with police officers at Christmas Hill Park.

For 41 years, the festival billed itself as the world’s biggest celebration of the pungent bulb, and Garlic touts itself as the world’s largest producer of garlic. Local producer Christopher Garlic has for decades a major source of funds for the festival and a major philanthropy in the South Bay.

Established to celebrate garlicky foods and the tight-knit Gilroy community, the event attracted worldwide visitors every July and raised more than $12 million for schools and local charities.

Garlic festival attendance approached 100,000 over three days in this South Santa Clara County city, population 60,000.

Efforts to bring back the festival began as early as 2020, but they were hindered by the pandemic. In 2021, the association attempted a smaller iteration, but post-shooting insurance costs proved too high to reopen the festival as a huge local event.

 

Three decades of journalism experience, as a writer and editor with Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Lee newspapers, as a business journal editor and publisher and as a weekly newspaper editor in Scotts Valley and Gilroy; with the Weeklys group since 2017. Recipient of several first-place writing and editing awards, California News Publishers Association.