Romanza Ends St. Augustine's Celtic Festival and St. Patrick Parade After 15 Years

The St. Augustine Celtic Music & Heritage Festival and the St. Patrick Parade are over for good. Romanza-St. Augustine, Inc. announced the end of both events Tuesday, Aug. 11, on the festival's Facebook page, closing out a 15-year run that filled Francis Field every March with pipe bands, Highland Games and one of the last big free family weekends downtown.

Nobody at the field in March knew it was a farewell. The final festival ran Saturday, March 14, and Sunday, March 15, 2026, with the whiskey tasting the Friday night before. The parade stepped off Saturday morning and looped back to Francis Field, where music carried on until 10 p.m. Sunday's stages shut down at 7.

Romanza president Albert Syeles said the events were always about more than entertainment, describing them as a celebration of heritage, friendship, volunteer spirit and the extraordinary story of St. Augustine as America's Oldest Celtic City. That claim rests on real records: the first documented St. Patrick's Day observance anywhere in what is now the United States happened here in 1600, followed by the first recorded St. Patrick procession in 1601.

Why it stopped

Romanza laid out the reasons plainly. State arts and culture grants have not come through since 2024. Support from local government has declined. Getting U.S. work visas for performers has become difficult, and the bands that anchored the main stage came from Scotland, Ireland and beyond. Supply and labor costs went up. The weather in recent years did not cooperate.

Any one of those is survivable for a volunteer-run nonprofit. All of them at once is not.

The state funding piece has hit St. Augustine's arts groups hard since June 2024, when the governor vetoed roughly $32 million in arts and culture program grants in a single line, wiping out awards to hundreds of museums, theaters and festivals statewide. Funding partially returned in later budgets, but with a much stricter scoring system: organizations that once qualified with a score of 80 now need 95, and local news reports have documented St. Augustine museums and theaters losing awards they had planned their seasons around. This summer's state budget approved about $20 million for arts programming while vetoing roughly $3 million in Culture Builds Florida grants, the smaller awards of $25,000 or less that go to modest nonprofits and individual artists.

What St. Augustine loses

The festival started in 2011 and grew into a full weekend: international and American Celtic bands, sanctioned Highland Games, Celtic artisans, heritage food, workshops and lectures, plus kids' activities. Admission to the parade cost nothing, which mattered to families who could not spend a weekend on tickets.

By Romanza's own accounting, its parade was the only St. Patrick's Day parade in Northeast Florida. There is now no announced replacement. Neither the city nor St. Johns County has said whether another organizer could take over the March date at Francis Field.

Romanza isn't going away

The organization says it remains committed to arts, culture, music and heritage programming in St. Augustine. Its own event list still runs the Romanza Festivale of the Arts, the 10-day spring celebration it has produced since 2012, through 2027. The Collage concert series has been part of its fall and winter lineup since 2022.

For anyone who wants the Celtic weekend back, the next real decision points are budget ones: how the city and county allocate cultural and event dollars for the coming year, and whether the state's grant thresholds shift again in the next legislative session. Romanza has not indicated it will reapply for either event.

More St. Augustine news, events and community coverage is always at St. Augustine Community Website. Have a memory of the parade or a thought on what should fill that March weekend? Join the conversation in our Community Forum.

Read more local events stories and community coverage from around the Oldest City.

Header photo: Reviewer32086 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)