Pacific Grove Butterfly Parade
Pacific Grove, CA · Quirky
- When
- October 3, 2026
- Where
- Robert H. Down Elementary School, 485 Pine Ave · Pacific Grove · CA
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Confirmed from the organizer's published schedule
Every October since the 1930s, Pacific Grove schoolchildren dress as monarch butterflies and parade through downtown to mark the monarchs' return to their overwintering groves in town. The parade starts near Robert H. Down Elementary School and is followed by a butterfly-themed bazaar and concert. It is a locally organised tradition tied to the city's self-styled identity as Butterfly Town USA.
The history within reach
- Pacific Grove Butterfly Paradesame spot
Every October since the 1930s, Pacific Grove schoolchildren dress as monarch butterflies and parade through downtown to mark the monarchs' return to their overwintering groves in town.
Built in the shell of the Hovden cannery with money from the Packard family, around a tank nobody was sure would work: living kelp needs surge, so they built a machine to make waves and pumped raw seawater straight in from the bay.
At the peak the canneries on this street processed a quarter of a million tons of sardines a year and the whole town smelled of it.
Sent up the coast to find the harbour Vizcaíno had described as sheltered and magnificent, Portolá's party reached it, looked at a wide shallow bight in bad weather, decided this could not possibly be the place, and kept walking north.
It began in 1941 as a secret school in a disused San Francisco hangar teaching Japanese to Nisei soldiers, men whose families were being interned while they trained.