How we check

Spectacular Atlas lists light festivals, drone shows, lantern festivals, projection mapping, immersive art venues, giant parades and other visual spectacles that are worth planning a trip around. A listing only appears when we can point to the organizer's own website, and every date on it is quoted from a source you can open yourself.

What gets listed

The visual spectacle has to be the main reason to go, and the event has to draw visitors from beyond its own area, or be unusually large or distinctive. Drone shows qualify when they are public and scheduled, and either recur, use 500 or more drones, tour, or belong to a major festival. We leave out ordinary fireworks, local holiday parades and shopping-mall light displays.

How a date gets onto a page

• We find candidates by searching each country in its own languages and by watching news feeds.
• For each one, we fetch the official website and copy the exact words that state the dates.
• A separate check fetches every source again and confirms that the quoted words are on the page and that each date we show is inside them. Anything that fails is held back.
• As an event approaches we check it more often, daily in the final weeks for our top picks, and we record every change.

What the date labels mean

• Dates confirmed: published by the organizer and quoted on the page.
• Provisional dates: published by the organizer but described as provisional.
• Dates reported in the news: not yet on the organizer's site.
• Expected, based on past years: an estimate from a fixed rule or earlier editions. Do not book on this alone.
• Dates not announced yet: the event exists, but the next dates are not out.
• Open year-round and Regular schedule: permanent venues and repeating shows.

What the sizes mean

• Mega: roughly a million or more visitors, a drone show of 5,000 or more drones, or a country's national flagship event.
• Major: roughly 200,000 to a million visitors, or 1,000 or more drones.
• Notable: smaller, but worth planning around if you are nearby.

Sizes are our estimates from published visitor numbers, drone counts and national standing. Treat them as a rough guide to scale, not a measure of quality.

Coverage so far

628 spectacles in 74 countries, compiled October 17, 2026:

• East Asia: 128
• Southeast Asia: 59
• South Asia: 7
• Middle East and Central Asia: 27
• Europe: 161
• North America: 190
• Latin America and the Caribbean: 37
• Africa: 5
• Oceania: 14

Every region has now been searched country by country, and state by state in the largest countries. Many smaller events are still waiting to be checked, and mainland China is under-represented because many official sites there could not be reached.

Please double-check before you travel

Organizers change dates, sell out and occasionally cancel. Our checks are automated and can be wrong. Treat this site as a planning aid, and confirm everything on the official website before booking flights or hotels.

For developers and AI assistants

All the event data is free to reuse under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Please credit "Spectacular Atlas" with a link to the event's page, and point people to the official website for each event.

• All events as JSON and as CSV
• A calendar feed of every dated spectacle, for calendar apps
• A guide for AI assistants (llms.txt) and every event as plain text
• Each event page also carries schema.org Event data, and a calendar file at /events/<id>.ics
• An MCP server at https://spectacularatlas.com/mcp for AI assistants (add it to Claude, ChatGPT or another MCP client as a remote server), with tools to search by trip dates, place, type and size
• A read-only web API, /api/events, described in OpenAPI

Credits

Maps: OpenFreeMap, OpenMapTiles and OpenStreetMap contributors. Icons: Tabler Icons (MIT License), with lantern and fireworks icons drawn for this site.