What it means
Say “the Parada” in Scottsdale and nobody asks which one. The Parada del Sol is the horse-drawn parade that rolls down Scottsdale Road on a Saturday in early February, from Drinkwater Boulevard south to Brown Avenue and Indian School, and by extension the rodeo that carries the same name and the whole Western Week it closes. Locals use it as a calendar marker (“after the Parada, the snowbirds thin out”) and as a measure of the town’s self-image: for one morning the city of resorts and galleries insists it is still a cow town, and roughly 150 entries of mounted riders, wagons, stagecoaches and marching bands back it up.
The parade has its own guide at Parada del Sol Parade and the rodeo at Parada del Sol Rodeo. This page is about the name and what it covers.
Where you’ll meet it
On Scottsdale Road in early February, when the barricades go up the night before. On the Western Week schedule, where the Parada is the finale. At the Trail’s End Festival that fills Old Town afterward. At WestWorld in March, when the rodeo bucks. And in the Jaycees’ old programs at the library, where the name first appears in print in the 1950s.
Where the word came from
The parade is older than its name. In 1951, the year the town incorporated and the Chamber of Commerce made “The West’s Most Western Town” the official motto, the Chamber staged a Sunshine Festival to fill the winter trade with something to photograph. Two years later a new civic club, the Scottsdale Jaycees, took the event over, and in November 1953 the first Parada del Sol went down the road.
The Jaycees’ choice of name was marketing, and good marketing. Spanish place names were the Southwest’s shorthand for antiquity, and a town five years old needed some. The organizers glossed it then, and gloss it now, as “walk in the sun.” In standard Spanish a parade is a desfile and a parada is a stop, which has amused Spanish speakers for seventy years, though parada does serve for a military review in parts of Latin America. Nobody at the time cared. The name sounded right next to the Charros, the Howdy Dudettes and the Sunshine Festival it replaced, and it stuck hard enough that the “Sunshine” name faded within a decade.
The pieces accumulated around it. A sanctioned rodeo arrived in 1956, on a dirt lot where Fashion Square now stands, and later moved to Rawhide and then WestWorld. From 1958 the Hashknife Pony Express, the Navajo County sheriff’s posse, has ridden 200 miles from Holbrook to carry real mail into town and open the festivities. The Jaycees ran all of it for 56 years. When the chapter disbanded in 2009 a volunteer Parada del Sol Committee took over, with the Scottsdale Charros as sponsor, and in 2016 the city folded the whole run of events into a branded Western Week.
What it is not
It is not a Mexican or Spanish tradition imported to Scottsdale; it is a Chamber of Commerce festival with a borrowed name. It is not the Fiesta Bowl parade, which is Phoenix’s. And the rodeo is not on parade day: same name, different weekend, different ticket.
The fine print
The record is thinner than the tradition. The 1959 program in the Scottsdale Public Library’s collection confirms the 1951 festival and the 1953 renaming, and the Historical Society’s timeline says the same, but the site has found no contemporaneous account of who on the Jaycees’ committee proposed the words or whether anyone checked the Spanish. The “walk in the sun” gloss appears in the organizers’ own material and nowhere in a dictionary. Treat it as the festival’s story about itself.
The count is also soft. The 2024 parade was billed as the 70th, which does not quite square with a 1953 start unless a year or two were skipped; the 2021 edition was cancelled by the pandemic, and the early years may have had gaps the organizers no longer track. The claim to be the world’s largest horse-drawn parade, printed for decades, has never been independently measured, and the city’s own history page says only that the “annual Parada del Sol celebration began” in the 1950s.
What is solid: the route (Drinkwater to Scottsdale Road, ending at Brown Avenue and Indian School), the hour (10 a.m. to noon), the Trail’s End Festival from noon to 4, and the fact that for 70-odd years a town that sells itself on golf and galleries has shut its main street for horses. The 1950s chapter of the site’s history, at /history/1950s/, puts the Parada beside the Sugar Bowl, the Orioles’ spring training and the Arabian horse show as the inventions of a decade that made a resort town out of a farm crossroads.