"A purpose-built opera house in a Cotswolds village presents Wagner, Handel, Verdi and Humperdinck across a full summer season, one of the UK's most ambitious small opera festivals in a setting of extraordinary rural beauty."
Longborough Festival Opera
"A brand-new RHS show debuts in the sweeping deer park of the Badminton Estate, with award-winning show gardens, a lakeside restaurant and talks from leading horticultural names."
RHS Badminton Flower Show
"Three days at South Cerney Airfield bring together one of the largest gatherings of vintage vehicles, steam engines, working horses, buses and stationary engines in the South West, a complete world of working mechanical heritage set out across a former wartime airfield with the Cotswold Water Park shimmering beyond."
Gloucestershire Vintage and Country Extravaganza
"Vintage biplanes drone overhead while hard driving bluegrass and old time pickers jam around a bonfire on one of the quirkiest festival fields in the country."
Didmarton Bluegrass Festival
"One of the biggest one-day shows in England, held in the Cotswolds on the first Saturday of September, Shetland Pony Grand National, champion cattle, and a showground that fills the whole town with its presence."
Moreton Show
"Traction engines, vintage vehicles and working machinery gather off the A436 near Bourton-on-the-Water for a two-day show in the Cotswold limestone uplands, the kind of event that draws real working-machinery enthusiasts rather than festival-goers and is better for it."
North Cotswold Steam and Vintage Show
"The most prestigious sheepdog event in the British Isles, held at the Daylesford Estate where the finest handlers from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales compete across three days for the International Supreme title."
International Sheepdog Championship
"A medieval-rooted fair with onion-eating contests and the heaviest onion competition in a Forest of Dean town."
Newent Onion Fayre
"Parishioners join hands to embrace their church among the famous 99 yews of this Cotswold wool village."
Painswick Clypping Ceremony
"The world's oldest literary festival fills Cheltenham's Regency venues for ten October days with 500 events, from Booker Prize winners to children's authors, making it the essential autumn gathering for book lovers."
Cheltenham Literature Festival
"Each late November, Bourton-on-the-Water places a decorated Christmas tree in the River Windrush and gathers villagers on the green for a carol-led lights switch-on, making it one of the Cotswolds' most distinctive festive traditions."
Bourton-on-the-Water Christmas Lights Switch On
"Tetbury's beloved annual Christmas Fayre fills the streets around the historic Market House with craft and gift stalls, live music from the Silver Band, Santa's grotto, and a community lights switch-on at 6pm that draws the whole town together."
Tetbury Christmas Fayre and Market
"The most perfect high street in the Cotswolds hosts its Christmas market each early December, with honey-gold limestone buildings lit by torches, stalls that seem to belong to another century and the smell of mulled wine drifting past the fourteenth-century Market Hall."
Chipping Campden Christmas Market
"Around 3,000 rubber ducks are released down the River Coln at 11am on Boxing Day, a tradition now in its late 30s year that raises funds for Bibury Cricket Club and draws crowds from across the Cotswolds."
Bibury Boxing Day Duck Race
"Mummers shrouded head to toe in newspaper strips are led by the Town Crier to perform an ancient sword-fight and resurrection play around the village."
Marshfield Paper Boys Mummers Play
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Set in a hidden Cotswold valley, this 18th-century rococo garden opens each January for its annual snowdrop season, showcasing over five million blooms across fifteen named varieties including the locally discovered Galanthus 'Atkinsii'."
Snowdrops Spectacle at Painswick Rococo Garden
"A family snowdrop collection rooted in Henry John Elwes's 1874 discovery of Galanthus elwesii in Turkey has grown to over 350 varieties across ten lakeside and woodland acres in the Cotswold Churn valley."
Colesbourne Park Snowdrop Season
"Revived from medieval origins in 1972, the Randwick Wap sees a Wap Queen and Mayor carried through the village in costume before Double Gloucester cheeses are rolled downhill and the Mayor is ceremonially dunked in the pond."
Randwick Wap
"Top of the Pups dog show, hog roast, cream teas, and a licensed bar on the grounds of a Cotswolds manor. The afternoon is the point."
Cowley Village Fete
"Dozens of competitors hurl themselves down a near-vertical Cotswold hillside chasing a 7lb Double Gloucester cheese, a tradition that has drawn crowds to Brockworth every Spring Bank Holiday for centuries."
Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake
"Runners carry heavy woolsacks up and down the one-in-four Gumstool Hill, recalling the Cotswold wool trade."
Tetbury Woolsack Races
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Six days of talks, debates, demonstrations and interactive events bringing together Nobel laureates, astronauts and leading scientists to Cheltenham Racecourse each June in the UK's premier science festival."
Cheltenham Science Festival
"Shin-kicking, tug of war and a torchlit procession on Dover's Hill, games first held in 1612."
Robert Dover's Cotswold Olimpicks
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Since 1612: straw in the socks, hands on each other's shoulders, and the aim is to kick shins until someone falls. Judges wear top hats."
World Shin-Kicking Championships
Villagly Award · Bravest Shins in the UK ✦ Weird & Wonderful"A four-acre garden of formal lawns, wildflower meadow and fruit trees opens through the summer at the foot of Painswick, the Cotswolds hilltop village known as the Queen of the Wolds."
Richmond Villages Painswick Garden
"About 25 Cotswold stone cottage gardens open in a village famous for its roses, with cake stalls, a plant stall and flowers blazing in the medieval church."
Langford Village Open Gardens