Carnival attracts record crowd

Posted: Monday Jun 24, 2019

On Saturday night, Dunedin celebrated the shortest day and longest night of 2019 in spectacular style. The Dunedin Midwinter Carnival presented "The Never Ending Night", a themed procession featuring over 150 performers, 500 lanterns and over 1000 people.

The Dunedin City Council estimated that the event had been attended by an audience of 30,000, an increase on 2018’s attendees.

The event, which is organised by a small production and art team, as well as an army of volunteers, went off without a hitch in Dunedin’s Octagon. “We are so pleased with the result,” Carnival producer Paul Smith said. “The weather was perfect and everyone was in great spirits. We really couldn’t have asked for better.”

The event is free to the public, with donations collected as koha. “The donations support the future of the carnival,” Smith said. “We are continuing to collect donations through a givealittle page. Every donation, big or small, helps ensure that we will return in 2020.”

The givealittle page can be found here: https://givealittle.co.nz/org/midwintercarnival

A video was uploaded shortly after the event by the Dunedin NZ Facebook page, which has so far been viewed nearly 50,000 times in two days.