Crawfish Festival

Crawfish Festival (Breaux Bridge, Louisiana)

First weekend in May

The Crawfish Festival is a time to celebrate and eat the small crustaceans (also called crayfish and crawdads) in Breaux Bridge, La., a small Cajun village. Since 1959, by act of the state legislature, the village has been officially called the "Crawfish Capital of the World."
Crawfish is related to the lobster, and local folk say the crawfish is really the Acadian lobster that followed them to the bayou lands of southern Louisiana. The Cajuns are descendants of the French Canadians whom the British drove from the colony of Acadia (now Nova Scotia) in the 18th century. They still speak their own patois, a combination of French forms with words borrowed from American Indian, African, Spanish, English, and other languages; they often still live in small, self-contained communities.
The festival is a three-day event, featuring crawfish races (on a special circular table, with betting allowed), a parade, Cajun music night and day, a crawfish cookoff, crawfish races, and a World Championship Crawfish-Eating Contest. In the latter, contestants start out with a dishpan of five pounds of crawfish and eat for two hours. The prize is a trophy and crawfish to take home. As many as 100,000 visitors come to this village of 7,600 for the festival.

CONTACTS:
Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival Association
P.O. Box 25
Breaux Bridge, LA 70517
337-332-6655; fax: 337-332-5917
www.bbcrawfest.com
Louisiana Travel Promotion Association
1165 S. Foster Dr.
Baton Rouge, LA 70806
225-346-1857; fax: 225-336-4154
www.louisianatravel.com

SOURCES:
GdUSFest-1984, p. 66
(c)

Celebration days:
2011: May 7; May 8
2012: May 5; May 6
2013: May 4; May 5
2014: May 3; May 4
2015: May 2; May 3

Celebrated in: Louisiana