Vredefeesten Ballonfestival

The balloons lift off from the middle of a town, out of the largest market square in Belgium, between the buildings. That is the whole character of the event and the reason it is worth a page: nearly every other festival on this list needs an airfield. See the calendar for the ones that do.

It is also the oldest balloon meeting anywhere, running since 1948, when it was part of a set of liberation festivities rather than a balloon event. The ballooning grew inside a town festival that already existed, which is why it has no separate identity, no separate ticket and no separate website.

Launching from a square imposes the programme. Balloons inflate in a confined space with a crowd around them, take off in sequence rather than together, and the wind has to be right in a narrower sense than it does on open ground. When it is not, the balloons stay down and the festival carries on around them.

The evening set piece is a ballet rather than a glow: balloons tethered in the square, burners lit to music, and the buildings acting as the walls of the room. It runs late, and it is the part of the weekend that fills the town.

Public flights do lift off from the square, which is rare for an event this size, and what they cost is not published anywhere we could verify. For a visitor the practical point is that this is a town-centre festival: there is no parking problem to solve because there is no parking, and the trains are the answer.

The balloons are one strand of something larger. The Vredefeesten is a peace festival with a programme of concerts, markets and street events, and the ballooning has kept its place inside it for three quarters of a century without ever separating into an event of its own. That is unusual and worth understanding before travelling: the weekend is a town festival, and the balloons are its most photographed half hour rather than its purpose.