The Fringe began in 1947 when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the first Edinburgh International Festival and performed anyway. Nearly eight decades later it is the largest performing arts festival in the world — the 2025 edition sold more than 2.6 million tickets across 53,942 performances of 3,893 shows, with participants from 68 countries.

The scale is the point and also the problem. Nobody sees the Fringe; everybody sees a fraction of it and calls it the Fringe. The people who enjoy it most tend to book two or three things they actually want, then leave the rest of the day open for whatever they walk past on the Royal Mile.

What most visitors miss is that Edinburgh in August is running three festivals at once. The Fringe is the loud one. The Edinburgh International Festival — the curated original, with opera, classical music and theatre — runs alongside it, and the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo performs nightly on the Castle esplanade. Tattoo tickets go months in advance and run £40 to £330.

The world’s largest food fight lasts exactly one hour. It started in the 1940s as a spontaneous scuffle between friends during a local festival, and the town liked it enough to keep doing it. Now it draws thousands of visitors to a village of around 9,000 people, and requires a ticket — which usually bundles transport from Valencia and back.

The practical advice is unusually specific for a festival: wear clothes you will throw away, wear closed-toe shoes, and bring goggles if you value your eyesight. Tomato pulp is acidic and the crowd is tight. It is genuinely fun and genuinely messy, and it is over by lunchtime — which leaves the entire rest of the day, and most people have not thought about that part at all.

The oldest film festival in the world runs its 83rd edition this September on the Lido, the long sandbar that separates the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic. It is often assumed to be a closed industry event. It is not — public screening reservations open in late August, and a substantial share of the programme is accessible to anyone who plans ahead.

September is also, separately, one of the best months to be in Venice. The August heat has broken, the day-tripper volume drops after the summer peak, and the light on the water in early autumn is the thing painters kept coming back for. The festival is on the Lido; the city is twenty minutes away by vaporetto and largely unaffected.

Oktoberfest starts in September — always the third Saturday — and this is the single most common piece of confusion about it. Sixteen days, roughly six million people, and a scale that has spawned imitations on every continent.

Entry to the Theresienwiese grounds is free. What costs money is a table in a tent, and tables in the popular tents are effectively unobtainable without a reservation made months earlier. Groups without a reservation should arrive early on a weekday morning; the tents fill by late morning on weekends and stop admitting anyone.

Munich itself is where the value is for anyone spending more than two days. The Residenz, the Englischer Garten with its permanent standing wave of river surfers, the Viktualienmarkt, and Dachau an hour outside the city are all substantial. Wingman’s six Munich audio tours cover the market, the palace district, the WWII history and the Dachau memorial route.

Barcelona’s biggest street festival honours the Mare de Déu de la Mercè, patron saint of the city, and has become five days of street theatre, concerts, parades and light shows that are overwhelmingly free to attend.

The element worth planning around is the castellers — the human towers, a Catalan tradition in which teams build structures up to ten levels high with a child climbing to the top. It is genuinely astonishing to watch in person and impossible to convey in a photograph. The other signature event is the correfoc, the fire run, in which participants dressed as devils run through the streets with fireworks. Long sleeves and a hat are the standard local advice.

Late September in Barcelona also means the sea is still warm, the summer crowds have thinned, and the city is running at a temperature that makes walking pleasant again — around 25°C rather than August’s mid-thirties.