Mongolia festivals 2027: Naadam, Tsagaan Sar, winter events

The 2027 calendar at a glance

Naadam's dates are fixed in law and tradition; most other festivals move with the lunar calendar or are set by local organisers each year. The table gives each one with how firm its 2027 date is; provisional dates are the ones the operators running 2027 festival tours use.

Naadam: wrestling, horses and archery in July

Naadam is celebrated every year from 11 to 13 July across Mongolia, and UNESCO lists it as intangible heritage of humanity. Its three traditional games come straight from nomadic life: wrestling, horse racing across the open steppe in classes for horses of different ages, and archery, in which women compete as well as men, many of them in traditional robes. Around them come long song, overtone singing and the horse-head fiddle, and stalls selling khuushuur, fried mutton pasties, and airag, fermented mare's milk.

In Ulaanbaatar the festival opens on 11 July with the procession of the nine white banners from the Government Palace to the Central Stadium, a horse parade and an opening ceremony at about 11:10 after the president's speech. After the ceremony the wrestlers take over the stadium, while archers, women as well as men, compete on the grounds beside it and players shoot anklebones in the shagai contest. Spectators come in their best deels, the winners earn titles and praise songs, and the market around the stadium sells khuushuur and airag. The horse races are run on the open steppe of Khui Doloon Khudag, about 30 km west of the city, by age class over 15 to 35 km, with riders aged 5 to 12; tours drive you out on race day.

District and provincial centres hold their own naadams around the national dates, smaller and less crowded, so you watch the contests from close by rather than from a stadium seat. Khatgal, on Lake Khövsgöl, holds one on 10 July 2027, day 5 of View Mongolia's Local Naadam and North Mongolia tour.

The Danshig Naadam, held in late June at the Mongol Naadam Complex near Ulaanbaatar, was revived after about a hundred years and joins the three games to Buddhist ceremony. Lamas hold their own contests, and on the second day around 60 lamas in masks dance the Tsam, a ritual whose every movement is meant to dispel misfortune, as Ulaanbaatar's city tourism guide describes it.

Pickpockets work the crowds at Naadam and Tsagaan Sar, so keep your phone and wallet close in the stadium and the markets.

What a Naadam trip costs, and when to book

The simplest way to see Naadam on a first trip is to join it to the Gobi loop. View Mongolia's Gobi Desert and Naadam tour runs on two sets of dates in 2027: 2-12 July, with seven nights in ger camps through the Gobi and Kharkhorin first, a Naadam horse race on 10 July and the opening day in the stadium on 11 July; and 11-21 July, which starts with two days of Naadam and then heads south. Both are 11 days and 10 nights, with three nights in a three-star Ulaanbaatar hotel and seven in ger camps, nearly all meals, the van, driver and guide, horse and camel rides, entry fees, both airport transfers and two days of Naadam tickets.

The group price needs a date that fills to six travellers, from a group of 6 to 12; the private price for two runs whatever the numbers. Rooms cost more in summer: Kayak's monthly averages, read on 3 November 2026, make July the dearest month at the Shangri-La Ulaanbaatar, USD 487 a night against USD 274 in November. For the whole trip, with rooms, meals, SIM cards and the flight, our trip-cost guide prices ten days all in; add the Naadam costs above. Entry rules for 2027 are in the entry guide.

Naadam week itself needs little extra booking on a tour: the three city nights are in View's three-star hotel, and the two days of tickets cover the stadium and the race ground. On your own, the Central Stadium is in the city centre, with the archery and anklebone fields beside it; for the races, leave early, because the road west to Khui Doloon Khudag is busy all through Naadam. In 2026 the tickets went on sale on enaadam.mn at 07:00 on 1 July, two per account, and sold out within minutes; the 2027 sale has not been announced. It is the busiest week of the year, so book your Ulaanbaatar room with your flights; our where-to-stay guide compares the areas.

Book the tour first, early in the year, because the group departures have fixed places, then the flights. For more time in the north, View's 11-day Local Naadam and North Mongolia tour (6-16 July) costs USD 2,529 per person for two, and its 17-day June group tour, 11-27 June 2027 at USD 3,185 per person, ends at the Khuree Tsam Danshig Naadam near Ulaanbaatar.

Tsagaan Sar, the lunar new year

Tsagaan Sar, the White Month, falls on the first three days of the first spring month of the Mongolian lunar calendar, and the public holiday covers those three days. View Mongolia's lunar calendar puts them on 6-8 February in 2027; the government publishes the dates in each year's holiday list, and in 2026 they were 18-20 February.

It is a family holiday rather than a staged event. Families make hundreds of buuz, steamed dumplings, in the weeks before, and new deels, the long traditional robes, are sewn for the family. On the eve, bituun, the table is laid with a sheep's rump and towers of biscuits. On the first morning the younger person greets each elder by supporting their arms at the elbows, palms up, with "Amar sain baina uu?", sometimes holding a blue khadag scarf, and then the visits begin: parents first, then elders, relatives and friends, with dumplings and milk tea in every home. For a visitor the holiday days are quiet in the city: offices and many shops close while families stay home and visit one another, so do your shopping and errands before or after. View Mongolia arranges stays with families for the holiday; it falls in deep winter, which the next section covers.

The winter festivals: camels, ice and eagles

The Thousand Camel Festival has been held since 1997 to celebrate the two-humped Bactrian camel and the Gobi herders who raise it. Over two days there are camel races for three age classes, camel polo with five riders a side, a parade of a hundred camels in which visitors may ride, contests for the best-dressed couple and camel, and stalls of camel wool and camel-milk products. It takes place at Bulgan town in Ömnögovi, 680 km from Ulaanbaatar: about 580 km on paved road and the last 100 km on rough road. Tourist ger camps are closed in winter, so View Mongolia's visitors stay in Dalanzadgad's hotels, about 100 km from Bulgan, or with families in the town; its four-day camel festival tour starts from USD 725 per person. Nomadic Expeditions instead flies its group to the Gobi and bases it at Three Camel Lodge, which opens for that winter journey, at USD 7,600 per person for 4 to 8 travellers; the flights to the Gobi cost from USD 445 extra. MIAT's winter timetable flies from Ulaanbaatar to Dalanzadgad on Fridays and Sundays at 17:40.

The Khövsgöl Ice Festival is held on the frozen lake at Khatgal, organised by the local community and government, with horse-sleigh races, skating, the ice version of the anklebone shooting game and shaman and reindeer-herder traditions. Dream Mongolia, a tour operator, dates it to 27-28 February 2027, when the lake is covered by ice 1 to 1.5 m thick; the Lake Khövsgöl guide covers the lake in summer. MIAT's winter timetable flies from Ulaanbaatar to Mörön on Thursdays and Sundays at 07:25, and Khatgal is about 102 km from Mörön, about 2 to 2.5 hours by car. By land, the lake is about 820 to 1,000 km from Ulaanbaatar (Khun Odod and View Mongolia), and the bus from the Dragon terminal to Khatgal costs MNT 88,400 plus MNT 2,000 insurance.

The Golden Eagle Festival is the Kazakh eagle hunters' festival in Bayan-Ölgii, the westernmost province. It opens with a parade of hunters on horseback in their hunting dress, then eagles are released from a cliff and judged on how fast and cleanly they land on their owner's arm; on the second day they chase fox skins, and the riders play kukbar, a mounted tug-of-war. Nomadic Expeditions, whose founder co-founded the festival, brings its 2027 group on 2 and 3 October, and the ticket proceeds go to the Kazakh Falconry Association. Its 12-day group journey costs USD 12,350 per person for 6 to 14 travellers, plus USD 1,350 for domestic flights. A simpler way in is a local operator: Discover Altai, based in Bayan-Ölgii, runs a four-day festival trip from Ulaanbaatar on a group departure starting 1 October 2027 at USD 1,400 per person, with the return flight to Ölgii (about two hours), festival tickets, a guide, driver and cook, and nights with an eagle-hunter family in their winter house, about an hour's drive from the festival ground at Shar Nuur lake. A smaller Kazakh eagle festival comes first, in Sagsai district about 70 km from Ölgii, with around 40 hunters; Discover Altai dates it to 17-18 September 2027. MIAT flies to Ölgii; its October 2027 timetable comes later. Pack for winter nights, as Ölgii averages -4.7°C at night in October.

Winter changes the whole trip. Outside towns, travel in two vehicles with cold-weather survival kit and arrive before dark, and keep a spare day before your flight home, because fuel shortages can disrupt domestic flights and road travel. The entry guide covers health and insurance.

Month by month

For the weather in each month, see the best-time guide; the first-trip guide covers the summer route most visitors take.