Final numbers aren’t in yet, but Hemisfair officials said the 12th annual Muertos Fest, held this past Saturday and Sunday, almost certainly broke attendance records for events inside the downtown park.
“I’ve never seen something like that at Hemisfair,” said Andres Andujar, CEO of Hemisfair Park Area Redevelopment Corporation. For the past six years, the center city park has hosted Muertos Fest.
Dia de los Muertos is a Mexican holiday, traditionally celebrated on Nov. 1 and 2, where families welcome back the souls of their deceased relatives for a reunion. San Antonio’s festivities are the largest in the nation.
It’s “a very dense festival, so many people — and it was all laughter, no hatred. It was loud, but it was the sound of joy,” Andujar said.
The two-day celebration hosted more than 80 Day of the Dead altars, including a community altar where members of the community could add photos of their loved ones; live music on five stages; workshops for kiddos, a mercado featuring more than 70 vendors; and a procession each day.
Andujar said the park measures traffic in several ways, including by weighing the trash after an event. “We’ll get final numbers this week,” he said, but officials estimate that at least 75,000 people moved through the park on Saturday, and another 60,000 attended Sunday. “It’s an avalanche of people,” he said.
Last year’s fest attracted roughly 120,000 people.
Andujar spoke about the impressive turnout on Monday morning at a panel and live podcast recording on the future of downtown at Texas Public Radio. The panel was the kickoff event of CityFest, the San Antonio Report’s seventh annual urban ideas festival.
“When you see something that’s advertised as free, remember, nothing is free,” he said, describing how the rent paid by tenants in the southwest corner of the park, like Dough Pizzeria, Bombay Bicycle Club, Kuenstler Tap Haus and others goes “back into activating the park. So that buys a free concert, a little band,” he said.
Andujar also acknowledged that with the weekend’s crush of people came a crush of cars. “And what do we do with cars, and where do they park? It’s messy, it’s sort of violent, when you have this tsunami of people.”
He compared “event life” with “daily life,” the people who fill existing apartments like the ’68, and those who will hopefully fill future residences planned in the coming years, such as Oxbow’s plans for the corner of East César E. Chávez Boulevard and South Alamo Street.
Daily life and event life have the potential to clash “unless we think about it very high end, how one makes the other one better.”
The new features that make up phase 1 of Civic Park inside Hemisfair opened just over a year ago. Phase 2 features an expansive plaza named The Zócalo on the northwest corner of the park, across from the Torch of Friendship. Andujar said Monday the plaza will open ahead of the NCAA Men’s Final Four, scheduled April 5-7 next year.
“It’s hard to imagine the beauty and magnitude of what’s to come” on that corner, Andujar said. “We’re excited to be removing those fences soon.”
Doing so, he said, will activate what he called “the octopus effect,” where Hemisfair acts as a physical connector between downtown locations and attractions.
Hemsifair is establishing itself “as the front porch of San Antonio, where the community gets together. And I think times like this weekend with Muertos Fest proves up that this is a good place to gather.”
