The First Thing You Hear Is the Brass
It hits you before you even leave Eindhoven Centraal station. A tuba, slightly out of tune, bouncing off the concrete underpass. Then a snare drum. Then laughter — the kind that comes from a group of adults who have spent the last hour painting each other’s faces in a pub toilet. You step outside, and the city has become something else entirely.
Brabant Carnival runs February 14 to 16 in 2026, which means it lands on Valentine’s Day weekend. Whether that’s romantic or chaotic depends on your tolerance for beer-soaked strangers in frog costumes hugging you at 2 PM on a Saturday.
Four Cities, Four Personalities
The thing about Brabant Carnival that takes a minute to understand is that it’s not one event. It’s four simultaneous carnivals happening across the province, each with its own name, its own prince, and its own songs.
‘s-Hertogenbosch becomes Oeteldonk. Eindhoven turns into Lampegat. Breda is Kielegat. Tilburg renames itself Kruikenstad. These aren’t just nicknames — during carnival weekend, some locals will genuinely correct you if you use the real city name. I’m not sure how serious they are about it, but best not to test that.
Oeteldonk has the biggest parade. It’s genuinely enormous — floats that took months to build, some of them three stories high, many of them savagely satirical about Dutch politics. The build quality is impressive. These aren’t thrown-together party wagons; entire neighborhoods have workshops where they construct floats year-round.
Lampegat (Eindhoven) skews younger. More electronic music stages, more international crowd, probably because Eindhoven Airport brings in budget airline traffic. If you’re in your twenties and want the party-heavy version, this is your city.
Breda and Tilburg fall somewhere in between. Smaller, more local, arguably more authentic — though saying that out loud in Eindhoven or Den Bosch might start an argument.
What Actually Happens for Three Days
Saturday is when it properly kicks off. The carnival prince — elected weeks earlier in each city — officially receives the keys to the city in a ceremony that’s half solemn, half absurd. After that, the streets open up.
The parades are the main spectacle, but they only happen on specific days (Sunday in most cities, though check the schedule for each town — they’re not all synchronized). Between parades, it’s essentially a city-wide open-air party. Stages go up in market squares. Bars overflow. Brass bands — dweilorkesten in Dutch — roam the streets playing the same five carnival songs on rotation until they’re physically unable to continue.
About those songs: each year, every city releases new carnival anthems, sung in the local Brabant dialect. They’re catchy in the way that football chants are catchy — simple melodies, lots of repetition, designed to be singable after several beers. You won’t understand the words unless you speak Brabants, but that genuinely doesn’t matter. Just move your mouth and nobody will notice.
Costumes are non-negotiable. Not wearing one is the social equivalent of showing up to a formal dinner in gym clothes. The good news is that every city has pop-up costume shops in the weeks before carnival, and the threshold is low — a farmer’s hat and some face paint counts.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
Let’s be honest about a few things.
The cold. February in southern Netherlands hovers around 3-7°C, and you’ll be outside for hours. Whatever costume you’re wearing, layer thermals underneath. Your pride will recover; your hypothermic fingers might not.
The bathrooms. There aren’t enough of them. Portable toilets appear, but the lines get long, especially after 8 PM. Some bars charge for toilet access during carnival (a euro or two). It’s annoying but it is what it is.
The crowds. Sunday parade routes get packed. If you want a good viewing spot in Den Bosch, you probably need to arrive an hour early, maybe more. Families with kids tend to claim the front rows along the route. Standing further back means you’ll see the tops of the floats and not much else.
Phone signal. It gets patchy in the city centers during peak hours. Download offline maps before you go. Trying to coordinate with friends via WhatsApp when the network is crawling is a particular kind of carnival suffering.
And the hangover. Three consecutive days of outdoor drinking in February. Pace yourself or accept the consequences. Most locals will tell you Monday — the last day — is when the real die-hards come out, and everyone else is home recovering.
Getting There and Sleeping Somewhere
Eindhoven Airport is the obvious choice if you’re flying budget. Ryanair and Wizz Air both serve it, and it’s a short train ride to Eindhoven city center. From there, trains connect to Den Bosch (30 minutes), Breda (45 minutes), and Tilburg (20 minutes). Amsterdam Schiphol works too — the train to Eindhoven takes about 90 minutes.
Accommodation is the hard part. Hotels in the carnival cities sell out weeks in advance, and whatever’s left tends to be overpriced. Airbnb is an option but has the same supply problem. Some people stay in nearby towns — Helmond, Waalwijk, Roosendaal — and train in. Not glamorous, but functional. If you’re coming from elsewhere in the Netherlands, the last trains back run late but get extremely crowded.
Trip.com and KLOOK both list accommodation in the Eindhoven and Den Bosch area — worth checking if the direct hotel sites are sold out, since third-party platforms sometimes hold different inventory.
Eating and Drinking Your Way Through It
The signature Brabant food is the worstenbroodje — a sausage roll, but better than whatever you’re imagining. Flaky pastry, spiced meat, usually served warm from bakeries that have been making them the same way for decades. Every bakery claims theirs is the best. They’re all pretty good.
Beyond that, it’s mostly street food: frikandellen, kroketten, patat with mayo (not ketchup — don’t make that mistake publicly). Food trucks cluster around the main squares and along parade routes.
For beer, you’re in the right province. Brabant has a strong brewing tradition — La Trappe from Tilburg is probably the most famous, but there are smaller craft breweries worth seeking out. Most bars serve standard Dutch pilsner during carnival because speed of service matters more than variety when everyone is ordering at once. Card payment works almost everywhere in the Netherlands, but a few of the smaller food stalls might be cash-only.
The Strange Ending
Carnaval ends on Tuesday evening with the symbolic burial of the carnival. In some cities, an effigy is burned or ‘buried.’ In others, there’s a ceremony where the prince returns the keys to the city. It’s melancholic in a way that catches you off guard after three days of pure noise.
Then Ash Wednesday arrives, and the Catholic south of the Netherlands goes quiet. The contrast is jarring. Streets that were rivers of people twelve hours ago are empty except for the cleanup crews and the occasional lost fairy-wing headband rolling in the wind.
I left Den Bosch on a Tuesday evening once, and the train was full of people still in costume but with that thousand-yard stare of someone who hasn’t slept properly in three days. The guy across from me was dressed as a banana and eating a worstenbroodje very slowly, like it was the most important meal of his life. Probably was.
