Latin American Festival & Fair 2026: Ottawa’s Biggest Latino Street Party

One free day of parade, music, dance, and food at Lansdowne Park

📍 Get Directions Full Schedule

A parade around Lansdowne Park kicks off the afternoon, then the party moves indoors and out to the Horticulture Building and East Court for a full day of Latin American music, dance, and food — completely free, kids included.

🆓 Free Admission 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family Friendly 🎉 Street Parade 🍲 Food from 10+ Countries

💡 Cash is strongly recommended — most of the food and craft vendors are small, independent, community-run stalls, and not all of them can take cards.

Why Go Schedule Food & Vendors Essentials Getting There Tips FAQ

✨ Why This Festival Is Worth a Sunday

Ottawa has a handful of Latin American cultural events scattered across the summer, but this one is the original. The Latin American Festival & Fair traces back to 1997, when the Latin American Committee — a non-profit run by volunteers from the Ottawa-Gatineau region — organized the first parade around Lansdowne Park to give the capital’s Latino communities a shared stage. Almost thirty years later, it’s still doing exactly that, just with a bigger crowd.

What makes it different from a typical summer street festival is the sheer number of countries represented under one roof. Rather than centering on a single national community, this is a pan-Latin American event: delegations, dance troupes, food vendors, and craft sellers from across Central America, South America, and the Caribbean’s Spanish-speaking nations all set up within the same footprint at the Horticulture Building and East Court. It’s less a single festival and more a rotating sampler of an entire hemisphere’s cultures, condensed into one Sunday.

The parade itself is the emotional centrepiece. Costumed dancers, community groups, and flag-bearers representing individual countries wind their way around Lansdowne Park for two hours before the fair portion even opens its food stalls — it’s as much a public celebration of identity as it is a performance, and it’s free to watch from anywhere along the route.

🗓️ Sunday, September 6 — Full Day

This is a single-day event, so there’s just one schedule to plan around — but it’s a long one, running from mid-morning into the evening.

🍲 Food, Crafts & Community Vendors

This is where the festival earns its “fair” name. Rather than a curated food-truck lineup, the vendor floor is made up largely of small, independent, community-run businesses — many of them regulars who return year after year. Expect Colombian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Peruvian, and Central American kitchens, alongside craft sellers, clothing stalls, and local Latino-owned services.

🫓 Tamales & Pastelitos 🌮 Tacos & Taqueria Stalls 🐕 Caracas Dogs 🎨 Handmade Piñatas 💀 Day of the Dead Crafts 📻 Radio Festival Latino Booth

💵 Bring cash. Many of these are small operations without card readers, and the lines move faster when you’re not fumbling for tap-to-pay.

📻 A Homegrown Community Effort

The festival is organized entirely by the Latin American Committee, a non-profit made up of volunteers from Ottawa’s and Gatineau’s Latin American communities — not a city department or a private promoter. It runs its own community radio station, Radio Festival Latino, and works with a long roster of local Latino-owned businesses as sponsors, from bakeries and taquerias to money-transfer services and event planners. If you want a sense of who actually keeps a festival like this running year after year, this is it: it’s a community throwing a party for itself, and inviting the rest of the city to come along.

📋 Essentials at a Glance

🚗 Getting There & Parking

Lansdowne Park is one of Ottawa’s most transit-friendly event venues, sitting just south of the Glebe along Bank Street.

Public transit: OC Transpo routes serve Bank Street directly along the park’s edge, and this is the recommended way to arrive given the parade street closures.

Parking: Paid underground parking is available at the Horticulture Building garage, with additional paid Lansdowne lots nearby. Expect these to fill during the parade window between 1 and 3 PM.

💡 A Few Things Worth Knowing Before You Go

💵 Bring cash. This isn’t a card-first food-truck festival — many stalls are small community operations, and cash keeps the lines moving.

🚶 Get there before 1 PM if you want a good parade view. The route circles Lansdowne Park, and the best vantage points along the loop fill up as the 1 PM start approaches.

🚇 Take transit if you can. Street closures for the parade make driving in and out during the 1–3 PM window slower than usual — the site is well served by OC Transpo.

☀️ Plan for a full day outdoors and in. With the parade outside and the fair split between an indoor hall and an open courtyard, dress for whatever September in Ottawa throws at you.

🎶 Don’t rush off after the parade. Some of the best live music and dance sets happen later in the afternoon at the Horticulture Building, once the crowd has settled in from the parade route.

❓ Common Questions