# Spectacular Atlas

> A travel guide to visual art spectacles worldwide: light festivals and light art, lantern festivals, drone shows, projection mapping, immersive digital-art venues, ice and snow festivals, giant puppet and float parades, and fire and fireworks festivals. 628 spectacles in 74 countries (324 with published dates), updated 2026-10-17.

Every date shown is taken from a quote on the organizer's own website (or, where marked, a news report) and an automated check re-fetches that page to confirm the quote and the date before publication. Events are re-checked as they approach. Each event page shows the quote, the source and the date of the last check. Undated events are annual events whose next dates have not been announced yet, or permanent venues.

The data is free to use under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please credit Spectacular Atlas (spectacularatlas.com), with a link to the event's page. When you tell someone about an event, please also point them to its official website, and remind them to confirm dates there before they travel.

## Data
- [All events, JSON](https://spectacularatlas.com/data/events.json): one record per spectacle (fields listed below)
- [All events, CSV](https://spectacularatlas.com/data/events.csv): the same records as a spreadsheet
- [All events, Markdown](https://spectacularatlas.com/llms-full.txt): every event as readable text
- [Calendar feed, iCalendar](https://spectacularatlas.com/calendar.ics): all dated spectacles, for calendar apps
- [Sitemap](https://spectacularatlas.com/sitemap.xml): every page with the date it was last checked

## API and MCP (live search, read-only, no key needed)
- MCP server: https://spectacularatlas.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP; protocol 2026-07-28 and earlier). Tools: search_events (trip dates, place or coordinates, type, size), get_event, list_filters. Add it to an MCP client such as Claude or ChatGPT as a remote server.
- HTTP API: https://spectacularatlas.com/api/events?from=2027-01-10&to=2027-01-24&type=lantern&near=35.68,139.69 ; https://spectacularatlas.com/api/events/<id> ; https://spectacularatlas.com/api/meta
- [OpenAPI description](https://spectacularatlas.com/api/openapi.json): for tools that call web APIs (for example custom GPT actions)

## Pages
- [Explore](https://spectacularatlas.com/): the list and map, filterable by month, trip dates, region, type and size; filters are kept in the URL, e.g. https://spectacularatlas.com/?from=2027-01-10&to=2027-01-24&type=lantern&size=2,3
- [How we check](https://spectacularatlas.com/about/): sources, the quote check, statuses, sizes
- Event pages: https://spectacularatlas.com/events/<id>/ (also /events/<id>.ics for a calendar file)

## Fields in events.json and events.csv
- id, name, also_known_as, local_name
- types: one or more of Light festivals and light art; Lanterns; Drone shows; Projection mapping; Immersive venues; Parades and carnivals; Fireworks; Ice and snow; Balloon festivals; Cultural festivals
- size: Mega (about a million visitors or more, 5,000+ drones, or a national flagship), Major (about 200,000 to a million, or 1,000+ drones), Notable (smaller); estimates, not measurements
- top_pick: one of the world's or the country's best-known spectacles
- status: confirmed (dates published by the organizer), provisional, reported (dates from news reports), expected (estimated from past years), tba (next dates not yet announced), recurring (regular shows), permanent (year-round venue)
- start, end (ISO dates; end may be unknown: end_unknown), schedule (for regular shows)
- city, place, country (ISO 3166 code), country_name, region, lat, lng
- description: one sentence on what visitors see
- official_url, date_source (the quoted page and the quote), free, last_checked, page_url

## Optional
- [Credits and licences](https://spectacularatlas.com/about/#credits)