Held annually on January in Cebu City, the Sinulog Festival is one of Cebu’s claim-to-fame fiestas, which attracts tens of thousands of tourists from across the country and overseas.

Sinulog is traditionally Cebu’s version of the national day of celebration for pilgrims and devotees of the child Jesus or the Santo Nino which is on the third Sunday of January. As they do in many other parts of the Philippines that celebrate the fiesta, devotees hold religious processions to the church and hold feasts in households and various establishments. In Cebu, they do the “sinulog” dance, characterized by a two-step forward one-step backward dance, that is said to originate from some historical event. In 1980 the city government of Cebu initiated the now famous street dancing parade that attracts participants and tourists from all over.