A vibrant cultural heritage festival featuring community altars, traditional dance, face-painting, sugar skull workshops, and food vendors.
The Día de Muertos Festival takes over the Seattle Center Armory on Saturday, October 31, and Sunday, November 1, 2026. It's presented by Seattle Center Festál in partnership with the Día de Muertos Festival Seattle Committee, and it's one of 25 free cultural heritage festivals Festál brings to the center every year.
Inside the Armory, you'll find community altars, sugar skulls, marigolds, and pan de muerto, alongside traditional dance and food vendors. There are also performances, face-painting, sugar skull workshops, and visual art on display. The tradition itself goes back long before the Spaniards arrived, with historians tracing it as far back as 2,000 years among civilizations from the Aztecs to the Toltecs. It's a time to celebrate rather than to mourn, and that's the spirit that carries through the weekend.
The festival has deep local roots. It grew out of a volunteer-led Day of the Dead first planned in South Park in 1998, which expanded from Concord Elementary School before moving to Seattle Center in 2003; a new committee formed in 2013. Festál, which launched in 2017, has grown from eleven annual events to twenty-five. In 2017, they published Gathering Around the Table: A Festál Cookbook, a hardcover of recipes and photographs from 24 of its festivals.
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It's free and open to the public, so you can drop in whenever you like. You'll find it at the Armory Food & Event Hall, Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St, Seattle, WA 98109, running across both Saturday, October 31, and Sunday, November 1.
