Panagbenga draws thousands to Baguio

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — Thousands of local and foreign visitors cheered as the city marked the 30th year of the Baguio Flower Festival or Panagbenga in its grand flower float parade yesterday.

The floats passed along Session Road in the country’s summer capital, decorated with chrysanthemums, sunflowers and orchids. The city is celebrating the milestone edition of the flower festival with the theme “Blooming Without End.”

At the head of the flower float parade, the city government set the tone with horses cloaked in white and maroon mums pulling a regal wooden carriage – a nod to Baguio’s horse-drawn past and 2026’s Year of the Fire Horse.  

Hall of Fame entries delivered a spectacle, including those of Baguio Country Club, which fused fantasy and legacy in a pop-infused floral display, and SM Prime Holdings, which traced Baguio’s arc from the ruins of the 1990 earthquake to a landscape crowned by the city’s icons beneath a floral rainbow symbolizing grief and glory in one frame.

A day earlier, the festival unveiled a first during the Grand Street Dance Parade – a diorama titled “The Panagbenga Eras.”

The production opened with scenes of pre-1990 Baguio, honored Cordilleran weaving and ritual, then darkened into a reenactment of the July 16, 1990 earthquake that showed building façades crumbling and sirens wailing.

Launched in 1995 by lawyer Damaso Bangaoet Jr. and pursued by the Baguio Flower Festival Foundation to revive a shaken economy, Panagbenga has become a national tourist draw.

In 2017, it gained global prestige when Baguio was named a Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art under UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network.