Capitola Lost Its Flowers, Not Its Festival
If you have lived in Capitola long enough to watch the lighted barges drift down Soquel Creek on a September night, you already know the sight: a slow parade of glowing shapes moving from the trestle toward the lagoon while a crowd lines the banks with drinks and folding chairs. What you might not know is what used to float there instead of light bulbs and wire frames. For 65 years, those same barges carried flowers.
The festival now goes by a plainer name, the Capitola Beach Festival, and this year it runs September 26 and 27 under the theme "Toy Takeover." Most longtime residents remember it used to be called something else. Fewer remember exactly why the name changed, and the real story has less to do with civic reinvention than with a single flower supplier down the coast in Marina deciding to get out of the tuberous begonia business.
The tradition started in 1950 as a swim show. Peggy Slatter Matthews, a championship swimmer who had renovated the old Pleasure Point Plunge into the Santa Cruz Athletic Club, staged a floodlit aquacade that September featuring swim races, an around-the-pier contest, a water ballet, and a begonia-trimmed boat parade. It was billed at the time as the first water event held in Capitola in 28 years, in a city so newly incorporated and scrappy that locals nicknamed it "Scrapitola" on the eve of its first council meeting. By 1952 a dozen begonia-covered floats competed in the water parade, towed by underwater swimmers from Matthews' own athletic club, sponsored by the Capitola Businessmen's Association. The name Begonia Festival stuck by 1954, and the event ran every Labor Day weekend after that.
The flowers came from Golden State Bulb Growers, the successor to the old Brown Bulb Ranch, which grew its tuberous begonias in Marina and donated the blooms to the festival for decades. That relationship ended when the Brown family retired from the business and sold its AmeriHybrid and Antonelli begonia lines to Pan American Seed, a company based in Chicago. The festival did not close because Capitola lost interest in celebrating its own history. It closed because the one grower who supplied the flowers stopped growing them. In a detail that says more about timing than intent, 2017 was also the year the city named the begonia its official flower, the same year the festival built around that flower ran for the last time.
What happened next is the part that actually matters if you live here. The Begonia Festival's board did not disband. It formed a plan to preserve what it could and rebuild the rest. Michael Termini, now Capitola's mayor, asked the festival's leadership whether another event could take the same weekend's place, and festival past president Laurie Hill helped organize the volunteers who answered yes. The group that formed, the Capitola Beach Festival Committee, was staffed largely by people who had already spent years running the Begonia Festival. They kept the Sand Sculpture Contest, the Fishing Derby, the Rowboat Races, and the Horseshoe Tournament. They added a three-mile fun run, the Little Wharf 3-Miler, organized in partnership with Wharf to Wharf Race, Inc. And for the parade itself, they swapped begonias for LEDs, launching what became the first Lighted Nautical Parade down Soquel Creek. As part of that handoff, the committee presented a ten-thousand-dollar check to the Capitola Historical Museum to archive the Begonia Festival's history properly rather than let it fade.
That inaugural event ran September 29 and 30. The dates and even the year-count keep shifting slightly as the calendar moves, but the format that debuted then is recognizably the one running this year, just with a few additions layered on.
Saturday, September 26 opens with the Little Wharf 3-Miler starting from the East Cliff Village Shopping Center and finishing at the Capitola Esplanade, followed by the Sand Sculpture Contest, cornhole on the beach, children's art, a scavenger hunt through the village, live music at Esplanade Park, and the Lighted Nautical Parade down Soquel Creek in the evening. New in recent years, a drone show now follows the parade.
Sunday shifts to a quieter register: the Fishing Derby off the wharf, horseshoes in the sand, chalk art along the seawall, ukuleles at the beach, and rowboat races. The paddleboard race, now in its fourth year, is one of the newer traditions layered onto the older lineup, a sign the festival keeps adding rather than simply repeating itself.
Local businesses fund individual events rather than the festival as a whole, which means the sponsor list doubles as a small map of who is still active in the village. Sierra Utility Sales backs the Fishing Derby. The Skylight Place sponsors the Paddleboard Race. Capitola Self Storage sponsors the Sand Sculpture Contest, where trophy judging starts before 2pm and awards go out at 2:30. Capitola Grocery Outlet, the Lions Club of Capitola, and Capitola Mall jointly back the cornhole tournament. Laughing Monk Brewery sponsors horseshoes. Britannia Arms funds the beach concert, where the Beach Cowboys typically play. Even the parade barges themselves carry a paper trail: several were rebuilt with wood donated by De Mattei Construction, on a site made available by the City of Capitola's Public Works department. The nonprofit angle survived the transition too. Parade float teams can nominate a charity of their choice, with cash awards of $1,000, $750, and $500 going to the top three finishers, so the same creek that once floated flowers now floats fundraising.
If you are new to Capitola or just fuzzy on the calendar, there is a second September festival that gets mixed up with this one constantly, and the confusion is understandable since both happen in the Village within a few weeks of each other. The Capitola Art & Wine Festival runs its 43rd year on September 12 and 13, a juried show with more than 150 fine artists and pours from 22 Santa Cruz Mountain wineries, admission free with a festival glass and tasting tokens for anyone drinking. That one is older, bigger in scale, and has nothing to do with the Begonia-to-Beach Festival lineage. It closes out summer. The Beach Festival, two weeks later, closes out the season for good, with cooler water, shorter days, and a parade that now needs electricity instead of sunlight to be seen.
The begonias are gone for a supply chain reason that had nothing to do with Capitola itself, and the festival that grew up around them adapted rather than folded. The volunteers stayed. The creek stayed. The charity structure stayed. What changed was the decoration, and even that swap, flowers for lights, ended up producing something the original never had: a drone show visible from blocks away, a fun run that did not exist under the old name, a paddleboard race that did not exist a decade ago. If you are planning your last free weekend of September around this, know which festival you are actually attending, know that "Beach Festival" is not a downgrade from "Begonia Festival," and know that the barges gliding past Stockton Bridge this year are carrying the same volunteer hours they always have, just under different lighting.
If a festival's 65-year run surviving a name change and a supply crisis tells you anything about a neighborhood, it is that Capitola holds onto its traditions even when the details around them shift. That same steadiness shows up in how the village handles change more broadly, and it is the kind of local texture worth understanding before you buy into it. If you are thinking about what it actually means to live in this part of Santa Cruz County, from the September calendar to the market underneath it, Jessyka Sommers has spent years watching both. Let's Connect.
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