Panagbenga Festival is a month-long annual flower occasion occurring in Baguio. The term is of Kankanaey origin, meaning "season of blooming". The festival, held in February, was created as a tribute to the city's flowers and as a way to rise up from the devastation of the 1990 Luzon earthquake. The festival includes floats that are covered mostly with flowers not unlike those used in Pasadena's Rose Parade. The festival also includes street dancing, presented by dancers clad in flower-inspired costumes, that is inspired by the Bendian, an Ibaloi dance of celebration that came from the Cordilleras. Aside from boosting the economy through tourism, the festival also helped the younger generation of indigenous people to rediscover their culture's old traditions. The indigenous people were first wary with government-led tourism because of the threat that they will interfere or change their communities' rituals. The Bases Conversion Development Authority, in collaboration with the John HayPoro Point Development Corporation's annual Camp John HayArt Contest, gave its official logo from one of the entries: a spray of indigenous sunflowers from an artwork submitted by Trisha Tabangin, a student of the Baguio City National High School. The festival was set in February to boost tourism as it was considered as a time of inactivity between the busy days of Christmas season and the Holy Week and the summer season. On 1996, archivist and curator Ike Picpican suggested that the festival be renamed as Panagbenga, a Kankanaey term that means "a season of blossoming, a time for flowering". On February 2020, the festival was initially postponed due to the threat of COVID-19, it was later then cancelled on March 2020.
Activities
The month-long festival starts at the 1st day of the month, with an opening activities organized by the City government and private sectors. Many activities were also celebrated on the duration of the month. But the most crowd-generating events were in the last week of the festival, the Street Dancing and Float Parade, after it, Session Road was closed for a week for exhibits. Simulcast, Wright Park honors their pony boys and horse trainers. Closing ceremonies were at the night of the last day of the fest.
