Fête des Vendanges de Montmartre

The apartment we are staying in for our first month in Paris is in the 20th arrondissement, in the Montmartre neighborhood. We've been taking a lot of walks around the neighborhood and ran across a tiny vineyard tucked away on the streets behind Sacre Coeur.

When we were back in the apartment later, I looked up the vineyard in the travel guide we brought with us and discovered that the annual harvest festival for the vineyard, la Fête des Vendanges de Montmartre, was taking place the very next weekend.

The festival took place over 5 days and had a wide variety of events, but the one that fit best with our schedules was the parade. There was an elaborate map of the parade route on the festival website that contained times that the parade would be in each zone of the route. The times seemed fairly generous given the very small amount of ground covered, so we arrived at the parade route early, just in case. There were very few people waiting around when we arrived, but it eventually filled in.

The parade was composed of a large number of different groups of people walking and a few people riding in Rolls Royce convertibles, but other than a life-sized cow statue on wheels and a grill on wheels (cooking fish while it was being pulled down the street), there were no floats.

We saw bands . . .

Dancers . . .

And a lot of groups of (mostly older) people wearing matching outfits . . .

The festival website had a list of all of the groups in the parade, which contained a lot of confréries (brotherhoods) devoted to various things from garlic to wine. The confréries would wear matching robes or themed outfits and sometimes medallions.

Some seemed very serious and others were more light-hearted, like one of our favorites, the Confrérie Nationale des Chauves de France (National Brotherhood of the Bald of France), who wore comb medallions and carried a giant comb:

While we were waiting on the parade to make it to our area, people were waiting on the curb and spilling into the street a bit.

But as the parade finally reached us, the crowd pushed into the street, narrowing the parade route and leaving the sidewalk empty.

The parade was pretty slow-moving and groups would end up stopped in front of where we were standing for a while at times. When the parade stopped in between groups, the photographers from the crowd (including my personal photographer) would spill into the middle of the street, hoping for a glimpse of the next group. When the parade started moving again, you would see people come running out of the middle of the street.

We also really enjoyed the number of people we saw that did not appear to be an official part of the parade, but were just walking down the parade route in the middle of the street.

It was a lot of fun and a great way to spend one of our first Saturday afternoons in Paris.