Augsburg Plaerrer

Augsburg's Plarrer, whose name comes from the local word for the noisy 'bawling' of nineteenth-century boat swings and shooting galleries, moved outside the old city walls in 1878 and runs twice a year, in spring and late summer, each edition spanning two weeks. Anchored by the permanent Binswanger and Schaller beer tents, it is billed as the largest beer festival in Bavarian Swabia, offering an Oktoberfest-style format at a smaller, more local scale.

Augsburg's city-centre market festivals, known as Dults, reach back more than a thousand years, but the funfair's move away from that historic core came in the nineteenth century, when the noise generated by boat swings and shooting galleries — locally called 'Geplarre', or bawling, the word that gives the modern festival its name — grew disruptive enough that the city relocated the amusements to a new site outside the old walls in 1878.