Arizona Renaissance Festival halts upcoming season

Due to increasing health and safety concerns related to COVID-19, winter in the southwest will come and go without the time-traveling celebration of the annual Arizona Renaissance Festival.

With a COVID-19 Safe Event plan and capacity limitations recently approved by Pinal County, organizers have been preparing for operating safely.

With negative COVID-19 conditions dramatically increasing, the worst since the beginning of the pandemic, and with cases projected to increase over the next weeks, the festival now has a concern that even with its plan in place audience support to open can become limited in comparison to the attendance necessary to be successful.

Organizers have made the difficult decision to not open the annual Festival in February of 2021.

“For the health and safety of our participants, for our guests, and for everyone’s families and the communities all arrive from, we look to be part of the virus mitigation solution. We are saddened this decision may result in further hardship for our valued Renaissance Festival community of artists,” according to Festival Producer Jeffrey Siegel.

For many, attending the Festival is an annual tradition and represents a unique escape from their daily cares, a celebration of a simpler time and place where history and fantasy collide. “We will be back. The Festival village gates will open again. Our patrons and participants are counting on it,” Siegel says.

Established in 1989, the Annual Arizona Renaissance Festival & Artisan Marketplace is a 14-stage theater, an outdoor whimsical village, a 50-acre circus, an arts & crafts fair, a jousting tournament and a feast – all rolled into one nonstop, daylong adventure. The Festival will return in February of 2022.