Well, all those umbrellas did not go to waste. The ones people carried to the Locos parade and the ones sold by vendors under threatening skies.

The rains stayed away and thousands of gaily costumed — and bizarrely, quaintly, curiously, delightfully, enchantingly, dreamily, whimsically, scarily, creepily, amusingly and shockingly costumed — paraders strutted, danced, boogied, jumped and jived their way down the Ancha, en route to the Jardin Allende in the civic square.

Just another Dia de los Locos. Just as crazy. Just as much fun.

That little thing in Washington, D.C.? It’s got nothing on San Miguel de Allende’s annual Día de los Locos parade. But then, we’ve had two weeks of nightly processions/parades in honor of San Antonio de Padua, who is the spiritual guest of honor.

Anyhow, the umbrellas? People turn them upside down to catch the candies and rubber balls thrown by the paraders. It qualifies as a shower. Tons of candies of every form and color of sugar imaginable. The magical quality is in how it puts smiles on the faces of little children when they catch their first piece of candy.

This is pretty much my favorite parade of the year. And every year, I promise myself that I will shoot fewer photographs and every year, I run the battery down on my iPhone snapping thousands of images.

I can’t help it. It is like the candy the kids haul in: 10 pieces or 100, it is never enough.

This year, though, I got smart. I brought a spare battery pack to clip on when the phone battery went in the red.

Lucky me. Now I can shoot 2,000 photos at a Locos parade and spend the next four hours editing and picking out my favorites.

Yikes!

I hope you enjoy this small slice of the 2025 Locos parade. It was one for the books. (As always, click on any photo to see a larger version.)