Limoux Carnival

Limoux Carnival has run since 1604, tracing further back to fourteenth-century tax-day traditions, making it the longest continuously running carnival in the world. Spread across two to three months of winter weekends rather than one concentrated event, it centers on around 600 Pierrots Limouxin, sad-masked costumed dancers, and 200 musicians called Fecos, organized into neighborhood or trade-based bandes performing choreographed routines through the town's medieval arcades three times daily.

Limoux Carnival has been celebrated in something close to its present form since 1604, though its roots reach back further still, to a fourteenth-century tradition in which local millers paid their taxes to the Prouille monastery on Shrove Tuesday, giving the celebration a documented lineage considered the longest continuously running carnival tradition in the world.