Benidorm Pride 2026 closes the European summer season on the Costa Blanca, running from 1 to 6 September, with the parade on Saturday 5 September. Now in its sixteenth edition, the festival has built a reputation as the last big beach Pride of the summer, drawing a large British and Irish crowd to a week of shows, pool parties and street celebrations. It was created in 2011 and is coordinated by the team of Santos Torres with the backing of Benidorm town council.
The parade is the centrepiece and sets off at 4:30pm from the Rincon de Loix end of the Playa de Levante, moving along the seafront and the Avenida del Mediterraneo towards the Auditorium Julio Iglesias by the old town. Thousands line the promenade for the floats, performers, dancers and DJs, and the procession flows straight into a free show on the main stage at the auditorium in the early evening. Watching costs nothing.
The parade is one day of six, and the surrounding programme fills the calendar with ticketed and free events across the resort.
The week typically opens with a Pink Playa beach party at KU Playa in midweek and a pool party at the Marina Resort, then builds towards the weekend. A White Party and a run of themed nights fill the evenings at the auditorium and the clubs, with a circuit party at the Discoteca Penelope on the Saturday and after-parties that carry on into the small hours. Recent editions have priced these accessibly, from around ten euros for the beach party to twenty-five for the pool party and about sixteen for the White Party with a drink included, which keeps a full week within reach.
Away from the beachfront stages, the heart of gay Benidorm is the Casco Antiguo, the Old Town, where the bars and cabaret venues that take part in Pride are concentrated. It is walkable, dense and central, and it is where much of the nightlife lands once the official shows are over. The festival has also carried a cultural strand in past years, with exhibitions on LGBTQ+ history, book presentations and screenings sitting alongside the parties.
The festival runs 1 to 6 September 2026. The parade and the main-stage shows at the Auditorium Julio Iglesias are free; pool parties, the White Party and the circuit party are ticketed, most at modest prices. Benidorm is an hour from Alicante airport, well served by buses and trains, and built for exactly this kind of holiday, with the beach, the Old Town and the venues all close together. The resort is used to big crowds, and Pride week draws upwards of thirty thousand visitors over its seven nights, so booking beds and the ticketed parties early is the sensible move.
Benidorm sits at the tail end of the season, so it slots neatly onto the end of a longer trip; our look at how Europe is preparing for Pride 2026 is a useful place to plan the wider calendar around it.
Warm sea in September, a free parade along the promenade, a compact Old Town full of bars and a crowd that comes specifically to send the summer off: Benidorm Pride 2026 is an easy, sunny, sociable Pride that asks very little planning and delivers a lot of party. With the sea still warm in September and a large, loyal British and Irish following, it has become the fixture that unofficially closes the European Pride season.
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