This 200-year-old Minho romaria takes over Ponte de Lima from 9 to 14 September
The Feiras Novas run for six days and mark two centuries since the royal charter of 1826. Concertina parades, giant puppets, fado in the Paço do Marquês gardens and a historical procession on Sunday the 13th.
There are country festivals, and then there are the Feiras Novas. Ponte de Lima gives its whole town over to this one from 9 to 14 September, and 2026 is not an ordinary year for it: the festival turns 200, counting from the royal charter of 5 May 1826.
If you have never been, drop any image of a stage and a headline act. That is not what this is. For six days there is music coming out of somewhere at all hours, oversized carnival figures move through the streets behind the players, the fairground runs, the fireworks go up and almost nobody sleeps properly.
Day by day
Wednesday the 9th opens with concertinas, a street parade and a gathering of players from across the municipality. On Thursday the brass bands take Largo de Camões and a bagpipe festival sets up beside the parish church.
Friday the 11th brings the traditional mortar salute, and the evening splits three ways between the sung duels of the cantares ao desafio, fado in the gardens of the Paço do Marquês and student tunas in Largo de Camões. The weekend is the peak, with music, folklore, religious processions and fairground all running at once across the town.
The centrepiece is saved for Sunday the 13th: the Cortejo Histórico, themed this year on the anniversary under the line “a romaria by night and by day, 200 years of Feiras Novas”. It is the parade that pulls the biggest crowd to the riverbank, and the one worth arriving early for if you want a decent spot near the bridge.
Getting there and staying over
Ponte de Lima is about 40 minutes from Braga and an hour from Porto on the A3 and A27. On the busiest days parking near the historic centre vanishes early, so plan on the outer car parks and a walk. Beds in town and in the rural guesthouses along the valley go weeks in advance, which is why this is running now rather than in September. The full day-by-day programme is published on the official Feiras Novas site.
If you are building a late-summer route around festivals with some history behind them, the Viagem Medieval in Santa Maria da Feira is the other big draw of the genre.
Update, 12 September: what is left
The romaria is at its midpoint with two days to run. Sunday the 13th opens at 8am with the mortar salute, at 8.30am with the zés pereiras drummers, pipers and giant carnival figures in Largo de Camões, and at 9am with brass bands that play there through the day and into the night.
The Cortejo Histórico sets off at 3.30pm, staged as a sequence of tableaux running across the two centuries: the residents’ petition of 1825, the charter granted under Dom Pedro IV, the first brass bands in 1850, the opening of the Teatro Diogo Bernardes in 1896, the first ethnographic parade in 1964 and the first desgarrada singing contest in 1969. Thirteen local groups and associations walk it, each under its own banner.
At 9pm the Festival Limiano de Folclore puts sixteen folk groups from the municipality on two stages, one at Expolima and one on Rua Cardeal Saraiva beside the parish church. The mid-festival fireworks go up over the old town at 12.30am. Monday the 14th closes the festival.
Photo: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
