Pasto: When to go

Climate & Geography, Festival

By Lorraine Caputo

Pasto's altitude gives the city a spring-like climate year round. Anytime is fine to visit, but expect rain showers in any month. The months of June, July and August are windy.

The city has a number of festivals worth attending. The most famous is the Festival de Blancos and Negros, or Carnaval. Spanish colonists gave slaves every 5 January off; thus Black Day is celebrated then. But the modern carnival lasts much longer. Beginning 28 December, Day of the Innocents, a ceremony purifies the spirits. New Years Eve is the Años Viejos, when effigies representing the past year are burnt in the streets. The calles throng with comparsas (drum troupes), music, dance and horse parades of the Pericles Carnival on 2 January and the Indigenous Carnival on 3 January. Then the two great days of celebration: Black Day and White Day, 5 and 6 January respectively, marked with parades, murgas, drum troupes—and grease and talcum powder fights.

As if to get everyone cleaned up from the Carnaval, Pasto has a Fiesta de Aguas—a huge, city-wide water fight—on 5 February.

Pasto commemorates its saint, San Pedro, with firework castles, religious processions and guaguas de pan (bread babies) the last Sunday of June and the first Sunday of July.