What It Is

Type: festival
First held / when: late 1970s, typically held in summer
Where: Coconut Grove (the West Grove)
Related era: Flagler-Tuttle Era
In a sentence: A celebration of Bahamian music, food, and dance in the neighborhood Bahamian migrants founded.

The Goombay Festival is a street celebration of Bahamian and Afro-Caribbean culture centered on Grand Avenue in the West Grove, the historically Black, Bahamian-rooted section of Coconut Grove. Named for the goombay drum and its goatskin-and-rhythm tradition, the festival features Junkanoo-style costumed parades, Bahamian food, and Caribbean music. It is generally credited to the late 1970s as a way to spotlight a community that traces its roots to the Bahamian migration of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Crowd estimates have run into the hundreds of thousands in its larger years, though attendance has varied over time.

Why It Matters

The West Grove is one of the oldest continuously Black communities in South Florida, settled by Bahamian laborers — figures like Ebenezer Stirrup among them — whose skill with rock, lime, and tropical building helped raise the early city. The Goombay Festival is the public, celebratory face of that history, asserting the community's presence against decades of displacement pressure as the surrounding Grove gentrified. It anchors a cultural lineage that long predates Miami's Latin American era.

Neighborhoods: Coconut Grove Eras: The Flagler–Tuttle Era Movements / Organizations / People / Landmarks: The Bahamian Migration, Ebenezer Stirrup