What is the Arizona Aloha Festival?
The Arizona Aloha Festival is a free, two-day celebration of Hawaiian and South Pacific Island culture held every March on the lawns of Tempe Beach Park, on the south shore of Tempe Town Lake. The 2027 festival is Saturday and Sunday, March 20–21, 2027, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. Two stages run hula, ‘ori Tahiti, siva Samoa and live island music from opening to close; about 30 food booths serve plate lunches, Spam musubi and shave ice; an Island Marketplace sells leis, tapa cloth, carved bone and ukuleles; and a tent called the Hale Mana’o, the house of knowledge, teaches lei-making, language and the games of the islands.
It is run by Arizona Aloha Festivals, Inc., an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) whose board serves without pay, and it has been since the first festival in 1995, a one-day gathering at Heritage Square in downtown Phoenix. It moved to Tempe in 2009, according to Phoenix New Times, and grew into one of the Valley’s largest free weekends: the State Press estimated 150,000 visitors in 2012 and a University of Hawaii alumni report put the 2016 crowd near 175,000. There is no alcohol, which is part of why families treat it as the easy weekend in a crowded March calendar.
For a Scottsdale visitor it is 20 minutes down the Loop 101 and the 202, or one stop on the light rail from a Tempe park-and-ride, and it falls in the heart of spring training, when the Valley is full and the weather is the point.
How to do it
Admission is free; the money goes to food. Bring cash. Several of the better booths are cash only and the ATM queue is the longest line in the park. Expect kalua pig plates, manapua, haupia, island beef stew over rice, garlic shrimp, Hawaiian barbecue, Korean chicken, Filipino street food, yakisoba and, when the afternoon warms up, shave ice. The lines are shortest before 11:30 a.m. and after 3 p.m.
Getting there and parking. Tempe Beach Park has no parking of its own. Downtown Tempe’s garages are a short walk, priced by their owners and full by late morning on Saturday. From Scottsdale the better move is the light rail: drive to the Sycamore or Dorsey/Apache park-and-ride off the 202 and ride to 3rd St/Mill Ave, a five-minute walk from the park, or park on the north shore of the lake and cross the Mill Avenue bridge on foot. Rideshare drop-offs on Rio Salado Parkway work in the morning and crawl after 3.
When to arrive. The stages start at 10 a.m. and the dance schedule is posted at the Information Booth, where children also pick up the free wristband for the keiki craft area. The halau and the Tahitian troupes perform throughout both days on the Mountain and Lakeside stages; the drumming gets louder as the day goes on. Sunday is quieter than Saturday by a third.
What to do between sets. Aunty Aloha’s Ukulele Corner lends instruments for a lesson and a kanikapila, the informal jam. The Hale Mana’o runs lei-making, poi ball and konane, the Hawaiian strategy game, and short talks on Pacific history. The ‘Ohana Village is the nonprofits’ row: canoe clubs, Polynesian dance schools and the Hawaiian civic clubs that are the festival’s backbone.
The rules. No alcohol anywhere, sold or carried. No pets except service animals, no bikes or skateboards, no pop-up tents or oversized umbrellas. Low chairs and blankets are fine, and the lake side has the shade after 1 p.m. Afterward, Mill Avenue is a block south for coffee and dinner.
Thirty years of volunteers
The festival’s founding story is plain and the organization tells it plainly: in 1995 a group of Islanders living in Arizona staged a one-day gathering at Heritage Square to share Hawaiian culture with a desert city that had a large and mostly invisible Pacific Islander population. The Arizona Aloha Festivals nonprofit that grew out of it describes its purpose as awareness and education about Hawaiian and other South Pacific Islander cultures, and the festival is the fundraiser and the showcase for everything else it does: cultural arts workshops, speakers for schools, learning materials donated to classrooms, and small grants to cultural programs. A Kokua Award program for that work ran from 1997 to 2020.
The move to Tempe, which Phoenix New Times dates to 2009 in naming it the Valley’s best cultural festival in 2011, gave the event the lake, two stage sites and lawns that could absorb a crowd Heritage Square never could. The State Press counted an estimated 150,000 over the March 10–11, 2012 weekend; a University of Hawaii alumni chapter reported about 175,000 in 2016. Those are organizers’ and observers’ estimates, not turnstile counts, since nothing is gated, but they match what the park looks like at 1 p.m. on a Saturday. The 2020 festival, which would have been the 26th, was cancelled in the first weeks of the pandemic; the 30th anniversary edition in 2024 ran with two stages and about 30 food vendors, as KTAR reported.
What the dancing is
The schedule rotates Hawaiian hula, Tahitian ‘ori troupes with their log-drum sections, Samoan siva and other South Pacific Island dance, with live music between. These are community schools and troupes, not a resort show, and the festival is one of their largest audiences in the Southwest. The two-stage layout means a dance set is always underway somewhere, and the Hale Mana’o talks explain what the costumes and the chants mean for anyone who wants more than a show.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale’s March belongs to spring training and the Arabian horses, and both cost money. The Aloha Festival is the free weekend in between, 20 minutes away, with better food than a ballpark and a lakefront to walk off lunch. It sits in the same stretch of the calendar as the Valley’s other cultural festivals, Arizona Matsuri in late February and the Persian New Year Festival in Scottsdale around the equinox, and together the three are the best argument that the Valley’s immigrant communities, not its resorts, throw its most honest parties. Go for the morning, eat twice, and let the drums carry you back to the train.