SAN ANTONIO – This year’s Dia de los Muertos festival, Muertos Fest, invites the community to gather for two days of music, art, and remembrance in honor of loved ones.
The free two-day event will feature more than 50 performances on five stages, workshops for all ages, over 70 vendors selling crafts, and a procession honoring those who have passed at 7 p.m. on Saturday and 3 p.m. on Sunday.
The heart of the event will be the more than 80 altars built by local families, schools, and artists. The ofrenda builders spend over a month planning and creating these larger-than-life altars.
This Friday, the day before the festivities begin, the altar builders will spend all day drilling, building, and putting the final touches on the altars honoring their loved ones who have passed.
Judson ISD’s Coronado Village Elementary principal, Melissa Martinez, said they chose the theme of monarch butterflies to incorporate both science and culture into the students’ curriculum and to highlight the meaning of Dia de los Muertos for their students.
“We went with the culture and what that meant to a lot of Hispanic families on Dia de los Muertos, and then we made the connection of how the souls are carried from the end to another and how that’s related to our Hispanic background,” Martinez said.
Junior Lillian Burton, a student at Henry Ford Alameda School for Art Design, said this is her second year building an altar with the school. She said she uses this time to reflect on the loved ones she has lost.
“It’s a very serious holiday, and it’s a really meditative thing to just really celebrate people’s lives like you celebrate them this way. They are not really gone, because they are still in living memory,” Burton said.
Celebrate as a community during the free Muertos Fest at Hemisfair and Civic Park on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 9 p.m.
If you can’t make it, watch KSAT’s Dia de los Muertos special from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Oct. 30.
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💀 Things to do in San Antonio this weekend: Muertos Fest, Billy Joel & Sting, Spacecon San Antonio