Gilroyans and garlic lovers are busy getting ready for the Gilroy Garlic Festival, returning in 2025 as a revamped, more intimate—yet still iconic—version of the fabled food fest.
The Garlic Festival takes place July 25-27 at Gilroy Gardens, with an attendance cap of about 3,000 people per day. Tickets sold out almost as soon as they went on sale earlier this summer, but organizers say the festival’s impact reaches the broader community year-round.
Gilroy Garlic Festival Association President Paul Nadeau said although this year’s festival is scaled back from its glory days—when close to 100,000 people attended at Christmas Hill Park—ticket holders can expect to be part of longtime Garlic Festival traditions.
“We’re looking forward to being back, and we’ve worked pretty hard at getting the festival to represent all the things it used to have,” Nadeau said. That includes Gourmet Alley, live entertainment, arts and craft vendors, live cooking demonstrations featuring professional chefs and, of course, free garlic ice cream.
New among this year’s culinary offerings is a Garlic IPA brewed by Promised Land, available for sale at the beer and wine tents, Nadeau added.
More than 200 volunteers will help run the Garlic Festival at its new venue. The festival has also benefited from substantial in-kind contributions of services and materials, Nadeau added.
For decades, a pillar of the Garlic Festival has been its contributions back to local schools and community organizations. These contributions have come in the form of monetary donations funded by ticket sales, as well as vendor booths hosted by youth programs and community organizations.
Scouts, youth sports teams and other organizations additionally have earned donations by volunteering at previous Garlic Festivals.
According to Mayor Greg Bozzo, the Gilroy Garlic Festival has generated nearly $20 million for community organizations since it was founded more than 40 years ago.
“Among the biggest beneficiaries have been students in the Gilroy Unified School District. But many other groups—including civic organizations and places of worship—have received essential financial support,” Bozzo wrote in an opinion piece that is published in this week’s Dispatch.
The reimagined Garlic Festival has become a full slate of events that take place throughout the summer. On June 19 was the Gilroy Garlic Festival Songwriters Music Event at Clos La Chance Winery. The Gilroy Garlic Festival Golf Classic took place June 20 at Gilroy Golf Course.
This year will be the first time the GGFA has hosted a three-day weekend festival since the 2019 event, when a lone teenage gunman killed three people and wounded 17 others before killing himself in a shootout with police officers at Christmas Hill Park.
This weekend’s festival will take place in the South County Grove area of Gilroy Gardens on Hecker Pass Highway in west Gilroy.
