Festivals

The Gasparilla Pirate Festival is a local week-long festival in late January or early February with several lesser events (an arts festival, film festival, road race, and extra-wild nightlife). This is a several day festival centering on the attack by legen-dary pirate Jose Gaspar and his crew, yo-ho!

Guavaween is the local, Latin-spiced, Halloween celebration, based in the Ybor City neighborhood. This is a family event in the day and early eventing, turning into a more grown-up time later in the evening. This local fun is named for The Big Guava (Tampa) + Halloween.

Tampa is also famous for a rocking nightlife, and anyone looking for a night of clubbing should have no trouble finding it.

The Florida Strawberry Festival is just what it sounds like, a local celebration and promotion of Florida strawberries, with whole, cut, jellied, jammed, dipped, and every other kind of strawberry that can be thought of.

Arts

Tampa has a number of famous and historic theaters. The Straz Center for the Performing Arts hosts dance, theater, film, and other performances. The Tampa Theatre is a historic landmark film theater with old-school style and a rotating slate of films from across film history.

The Florida Orchestra is based in St. Petersburg, and plays an inclusive variety of classical music.

Opera Tampa is based at the Straz Center, and offers the Florida Opera Festival from mid-December to mid-March.

Tampa has it's own modern music scene, especially heavy metal, death metal, and Christian metalcore. Some local investigation should turn up a local venue or three.

Hillsborough County is the home county of the Florida State Fair, which runs in February, and has the usual mix of midway, vendors, club displays, agriculture and livestock exhibitions, and food vendors. One of the more unusual features of the 2013 Florida State Fair was the 100 Food Truck Festival, a huge collection of foodie food truck venues; this might or might not be repeated in 2014.

South Tampa is a confusing term; it can mean everything south of Kennedy and north of Grady, or it can mean everything on the Interbay Peninsula, including MacDill. MacDill is also used to refer to the off-base neighborhood north of base. Yes, it's a little confusing.