Festivals, 1 to 2 Nov 2027
Día de los Muertos
Mexico's days for the dead, 1 and 2 November, when many people paint their faces as elegant skulls.
Día de los Muertos is kept in Mexico on 1 and 2 November, when families build altars with photographs, marigolds, food and candles and visit cemeteries to remember their dead. The skull, or calavera, appears everywhere, in sugar, paper and paint. Painting the face as a calavera, white with dark eye sockets, flowers and patterns, is a newer custom that spread widely in recent decades. Many designs follow La Catrina, an elegant skeleton lady first drawn by the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada in the early 1910s as satire and made famous by Diego Rivera's mural. The face paint is meant as a celebration of those remembered.
Guides tied to Día de los Muertos
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Calavera: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
