Taiwan International Balloon Festival

Every other festival on this list is an event. This one is a season: it runs for most of the summer on a plateau in the least populated county of Taiwan, and the length is the point rather than an accident of scheduling. The calendar is otherwise a list of long weekends.

It exists because a county government decided that a short annual event was worth less than a reason to come to the east coast for two months. Ballooning was chosen, a site was built for it, and the festival has run every summer since the start of the 2010s as a development programme with a balloon on the poster.

The daily rhythm is what a long festival makes possible. Flights go up at dawn and again before dusk on most days rather than on three announced mornings, so a cancelled session costs a visitor a morning instead of a trip, and the special shapes rotate through the programme rather than all appearing at once.

Both kinds of flying are sold and both prices are published, which is rare enough on this list to be worth stating: a tethered ascent for the price of a meal, and a free flight for the price of a short-haul flight. The free flights are the ones that sell out first and they are sold well in advance.

The east coast of Taiwan in summer is also typhoon season, and the festival publishes cancellations rather than pretending the weather cooperates. Over two months that averages out; over a three-day trip it does not.

The economics are the interesting part. Taitung is among the least populated counties in Taiwan and the hardest to reach from the west coast, and the festival was built explicitly to change that: two months of daily reasons to make the journey, with the balloons owned by the county rather than brought in by visiting crews. Whatever else it is, it is the clearest case on this list of a festival used as regional policy.