What is Las Noches de las Luminarias?
A paper bag, a scoop of sand, a candle. Multiply by more than 8,000, light every one by hand before the gates open, and set them along the trails of a 140-acre cactus garden under a December sky: that is Las Noches de las Luminarias, the Desert Botanical Garden’s longest-running tradition and, for a lot of Valley families, the real start of Christmas.
It began in 1978, when executive director Rodney Engard proposed a one-night luminaria walk and volunteers folded and filled 700 bags for 600 guests. By 1989 it was three nights; in 2025 it was 19; the 2026–27 run is 26 select nights, November 27 through January 3, the longest yet. Hours are 5 to 9:30 p.m., entry is timed, and tickets run $39.95 to $44.95 for adults and $18.95 for children 2 to 17, a little less for members. Musicians are stationed around the loops, handbells here, a harp there, mariachi somewhere ahead, with Traveler World Orchestra, Simply Three and Vinyl Station on the 2026 schedule. Thousands of white lights hang in the trees, and this year the Garden’s Super Bloom installations by Graphic Rewilding stay lit through the run.
The luminaria is a northern New Mexico Christmas custom; what the Garden added was the Sonoran setting, saguaros and organ pipes lit from below along winding paths, which no plaza in Santa Fe can offer. It is fifteen minutes from Old Town, next door to the Phoenix Zoo, and it is the first December ticket to buy. See December in Scottsdale for where it sits in the month.
How to get a ticket, and what to do with it
The on-sale is the event. Members buy from October 1, the public from October 16, and the Friday and Saturday nights between December 11 and 23 are gone within weeks. If you are reading this in October, buy now; if in December, look at weeknights and the January 1–3 nights, which were added for exactly this reason. Prices step up on peak nights, so a Wednesday in early December is both the cheapest and the emptiest ticket. Members Weekend, December 4–6, is restricted to members and their guests; a household membership pays for itself if you plan to come twice or want those dates.
Take the first slot. Entry times start at 5 p.m. Arriving at the opening gives you twenty minutes of dusk on the Desert Discovery Loop before the candles take over, and the transition is the best part of the night.
The route. Do the outer loops first, the Sonoran Desert Nature Loop and the Desert Wildflower Loop, while your legs are fresh, and finish at the Ottosen Entry Garden terrace, where the tribute luminarias are displayed. Allow two hours.
Eating. The food stands along the route sell festive bites and seasonal drinks and are slow on busy nights. Eat before you come, or book Gertrude’s by Tarbell’s on OpenTable weeks ahead for a pre-walk dinner inside the Garden. Bring a jacket; the trails are in the 40s by 7.
Getting there. From Old Town, Scottsdale Road or 64th Street south to McDowell, west to Galvin Parkway, fifteen minutes without traffic. Parking is free and shared with the zoo’s ZooLights, which runs nightly in the same weeks; on a Saturday in December the Galvin Parkway queue is real, so come from the McDowell side and arrive early for your slot. Scottsdazzle lights the Waterfront back in Old Town for a nightcap, and our holiday season note lays out the rest of the month.
From 700 bags to a month of nights
The Desert Botanical Garden opened in 1939 on 140 acres of Papago Park red rock, a private nonprofit from the start and, for most of its first forty years, a quiet place that closed at dusk. In 1978 Rodney Engard, the executive director, wanted a reason for Phoenicians to see the collection at night in the one month the desert is cold enough to want a candle. The answer was the luminaria, the Spanish colonial Christmas lantern of the Rio Grande valley, which by the twentieth century had become a paper bag, sand and a votive lining the walls and plazas of Santa Fe and Albuquerque on Christmas Eve. Volunteers made 700 of them, lit them by hand, and 600 people came.
The growth was slow and then it was not. Three nights by 1989. Posada processions, the Mexican reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging, led by a mariachi band, in the decades since. Dale Chihuly’s glass among the cactus in the exhibition winters of 2008, 2013 and 2021, when the luminarias became the backdrop to the most photographed Decembers in the Garden’s history. By the 45th year, 2022, the count was past 8,000 bags and the run was three weeks; 2025 stretched to 19 nights and 2026 to 26, carrying the event across New Year’s for the first time.
Two things have not changed. The bags are still brown paper, still filled with sand, still lit by hand each evening by a crew that starts in the late afternoon. And the Garden has never missed a December since 1978, which is why we give it the authentic tradition badge rather than the invented one that a brand like Scottsdazzle earns.
Why it is Scottsdale’s December too
Scottsdale has plenty of holiday light, from a resort’s millions at Christmas at the Princess to the trains at the Railroad Park and the canal at Scottsdazzle. What it does not have is a candle. Las Noches de las Luminarias is the quiet pole of the Valley’s season, the one that uses the dark instead of fighting it, and it is fifteen minutes from the Waterfront on the Papago Park line the city treats as its own. The Garden has never pretended the custom was Sonoran; it came from Santa Fe, and the honesty is part of the appeal: a desert city that borrowed the right idea and then kept it for 49 years. Buy the Wednesday, take the first slot, and stand still on the Nature Loop when the harp starts.