The annual Durango Fiesta Days celebration is ringing in its 90th year with eight days of events. This year’s fiesta will commemorate the diversity of the Durango community as well as first responders, the military and breast cancer survivors.
Fiesta Days President Cindi Brevik said this year’s event will feature eight days of rodeo and community engagement, culminating in three ex-Navy SEALs jumping out of a plane into the La Plata County Fairgrounds.
“A central focus is not just our birthday, but celebrating all of the good things that are happening in our area,” she said.
Brevik said there will be several events at the fairgrounds that will make the 90th Fiesta Days special, including a carnival, rodeo events, an all-day community blood drive on July 25 and the Durango DEVO kids’ bike rodeo on July 26.
But, she said, the highlight will be when a team of three retired Navy SEAL and Special Ops paratroopers make two dives over the fairgrounds. The dives will be on July 25 and 26, and will commemorate America’s armed forces, first responders and breast cancer survivors, she said.
“Everybody in town is going to be able to join in and watch,” Brevik said. “I am so happy to be able to bring this to the people of Durango, because this is our celebration.”
She said even if people choose not to buy tickets to the events at the fairgrounds, they will still be able to see the show put on by the paratroopers from anywhere in town.
Brekik said Fiesta Days started in 1935 as a way to connect the Indigenous, Hispanic and European communities in and around present-day Durango. Back when the celebration began, it was meant to bring people together to celebrate the place they all called home, regardless of where they came from.
“The whole idea of the celebration just gives me goose bumps every time I think about it,” she said. “It was such a blending and recognizing of not only our differences, but also our similarities, and accepting everybody.”
Though there will be no Indigenous or Hispanic events this year, Brevik said she wants to make sure that is a focus going forward. This year, she and the other organizers of Fiesta Days ran out of time coordinating and bringing together everything they would have liked, she said.
sedmondson@durangoherald.
