The Winterval Christmas festival in Waterford traces its origins to 2012 when a group of local business owners and Waterford City Council sought to extend the Christmas trading period beyond the traditional eight-day shopping window that existed before that year.
Waterford Chamber of Commerce led the initiative in partnership with the council. John Grubb, then chief executive of the chamber, chaired the organising committee that launched the first Winterval on 23 November 2012. The festival opened with a lights switch-on by the mayor and ran for 17 days until 23 December.
The inaugural event featured 28 separate attractions, including an outdoor Christmas market on John Roberts Square, a 32-metre Ferris wheel on the quays, and an ice rink at Bolton Street car park. Organisers recorded 120,000 visitors during that first year.
Winterval grew each year. By 2019 the festival extended to 45 days and offered more than 40 individual events, ranging from the Waterford Eye Ferris wheel to the Christmas circus at the Theatre Royal. Visitor numbers reached 650,000 in 2019 before the Covid interruption in 2020 and 2021 forced scaled-back or online formats.
The festival returned fully in 2022 and ran from 18 November to 23 December, again recording over 600,000 visitors. The 2023 edition attracted 720,000 people, while the 2024 event, which concluded on 23 December 2024, drew 1.8m visitors according to figures released by Waterford City and County Council in January 2025, drawn form location of mobile phones riding the festival.
Winterval 2025 opens today, 22 November, and continues until 23 December, maintaining the 45-day duration that organisers established in 2019. The programme lists 42 separate events and attractions, including the return of the ice rink to Bolton Street, the Winterval Illuminates light trail along the Viking Triangle, and the Port of Waterford Christmas Experience at the city’s quays.
Waterford City Council first designated Waterford as Ireland’s Christmas City in 2016 during the fifth Winterval festival. The council formalised the title “Waterford – Ireland’s Christmas City” in promotional materials from that year onward and registered it as an official marketing designation with the European Union Intellectual Property Office in 2018.
Cumulative visitor numbers across the 13 festivals held between 2012 and 2024 exceed 5.2m, with direct visitor spend in the city estimated at more than €180m over that period. Organisers expect the 2025 edition to attract between 760,000 and 800,000 visitors.
Trevor Darmody shared: “I’ve been involved since the very start. The original festival director taught guitar at my music school, and he asked if we could put together the postbox collection show with elves and dancers. That was my first couple of years – I was the postbox collection guy.”
“I progressed to music programmer, then during the COVID years the festival directors were struggling, I got a call to jump in and help, and I ended up programming about a third of it. That’s when the council asked me to take over. This is my fourth full year as director.”
“It started as an economic driver for the city, to extend the shopping season, but it has progressed to being much more than that. People plan their Christmas around Winterval; families who moved away come home specifically for it, and people who came as children thirteen or fourteen years ago are now bringing their own kids.”
“It’s squarely a family festival. Everything during the day until about 8 o’clock is focused on young families. We have the big attractions – ice skating, the vintage fairground, parades, fireworks, drone shows – but I think the smaller, quieter things are just as important: gingerbread decorating workshops where you sit with your child for an hour, wreath-making, the Draw Your Own Hero animation where your drawing becomes the central character in a short film that gets emailed to you.”
“We run about sixty events; twenty-five are completely free, the rest range in price so you can do Winterval on a shoestring or splash out on river cruises or the Taste of Winterval food tours.”
“The budget is around €1.8 million for the six weeks. Funding comes in three main pillars: sponsorship, Waterford City and County Council, and concessions from the fifty outdoor traders and indoor markets plus the fairground and food stalls.”
“Visitor numbers went from about 550,000 in the early years to 650,000 until two years ago, then jumped to 2.8 million last year when we won European City of Christmas – and we keep that title forever.”
“Winning European City of Christmas gave us a network of cities across Europe. Last year we had our own portal linking live to Brno in the Czech Republic; people here could wave to people there and see each other’s festivals in real time.”
“I run the Waterford Academy of Music and Arts – that’s my day job. A lot of the workshops and technical side come from my own staff, and we keep the fairground vintage on purpose – 1970s chair-o-planes, galloper carousel – rather than modern thrill rides.”
“We’re starting to expand Winterval After Dark a little – free outdoor gigs, indoor theatre shows with Walking on Cars, Frances Black, late-night bars in the big wheel – but the heart of the festival stays with families and children.”
“The moments that stay with me are the small ones – last night a little child walked straight up to Santa after the lights switch-on and handed him a letter. That was perfect.”
