Something is always about to happen here. Two downtowns close their streets for a weekend and fill up with booths. Twenty-one thousand people walk pier to pier on a Sunday in October. Four hundred stationary bikes go up on The Strand for a day in May. There is a kite festival in March, a boat parade in December, and a 10K on Super Bowl morning that the rest of the country would find baffling.
Through the summer there are five separate free concert series running across five cities, most of them on a lawn or a pier, none of them charging a cent. We keep the whole schedule on the South Bay concerts in the park page, including which nights have music and which do not.
This page is the year in one place. The biggest events come first, then the calendar month by month. Most of it is free, nearly all of it is outdoors, and if you are new to the South Bay it is the quickest way to work out what your neighbors are doing and when.
What are the biggest events of the year?
Thirteen, and between them they account for most of the weekends when the South Bay stops being a set of residential cities and becomes a destination. Five of them are benefit events, which is a South Bay particularity worth understanding: the largest gatherings here are often fundraisers, and they are where the community actually shows up.
The ones that take over a street, fill a pier or shut a road. Where an organizer publishes a headcount, the bar compares it against the Friendship Walk, the biggest of them.
These pull crowds just as big. Their organizers do not publish a headcount.
Attendance and fundraising figures are as reported by each organizer. Several of these dates are set by a holiday weekend and move each year, so confirm before you plan around one.
What is on in the South Bay this month?
Most of the calendar clusters between Memorial Day and early October, with a second smaller cluster in December.
The year from May onward, month by month, with what carries over from the month before. Nothing on this particular list falls between January and April, though the events further down this page include a February race and a March kite festival.
Dates move year to year. Every event below links to its organizer so you can confirm the current one.
Live MLS listings, updated through the day.
What are the South Bay’s signature benefit events?
We wrote about why this pattern exists and what it says about these cities in The South Bay Gives Back.
If you want to understand how these cities work, look at what they raise money for. California funds its public schools at a level that leaves a gap, and in the beach cities the education foundations close that gap with events that have become the social calendar. You do not need a child in the district to go to any of them.
The Manhattan Wine Auction
The signature event of the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation, and the largest of its kind in the South Bay. It started in 1993 as a small gathering of parents. The 31st annual auction, held May 30, 2025 at the Bay Club’s Manhattan Country Club, sold out at more than 2,400 guests and raised $1.4 million.
The format is more than 45 restaurants, roughly 80 wineries, breweries and distilleries, over 20 live auction lots and several hundred silent auction items. Proceeds go to the MBEF Endowment Fund, which in the 2024 to 2025 school year contributed $1.2 million, about 19 percent of MBEF’s total grant to the district.
Tickets sell out. If you want to go, get on the mailing list in winter rather than looking in May.
White Light White Night
The annual summer gala for Walk With Sally, a South Bay organization that provides peer mentoring to children whose families are facing cancer. It draws more than 1,000 guests, with live music and a long list of Los Angeles restaurants. Everyone wears white, which is where the name comes from.
It is typically held in August. Venue moves year to year, so check the organization directly rather than assuming last year’s location.
Skechers Pier to Pier Friendship Walk
Every October, more than 21,000 people walk the 3.5 miles from the Manhattan Beach Pier south to the Hermosa Beach Pier and back. It has run since 2009 and has raised many millions across that span.
Proceeds are split between The Friendship Foundation, which runs one to one peer mentoring and recreational programs for children with disabilities, local public education, and the Skechers Foundation scholarship program.
Practical note for anyone living along the route: the Strand and the streets feeding it are heavily affected that morning. It is the one October Sunday to plan around.
Hearts of Hermosa
The Hermosa Beach Education Foundation’s annual gala, and the older sibling of the whole genre here. It began on February 14, 1996 when about 50 parents put on a Valentine’s dinner to raise money for the schools. That dinner became the foundation.
It now runs as an auction, dinner and dancing evening at Hermosa Vista School in the spring, with food, drinks and auction items donated by local restaurants, bars, businesses and parents. Smaller and more neighborly than the Manhattan auction, which is rather the point.
What is the Festival of the Kite?
A free afternoon at the Redondo Beach Pier in early March, and it has been running for more than fifty years, which makes it one of the longest running kite festivals in Southern California. It is presented by the Redondo Pier Association with the Sunshine Kite Company.
The format is simple: kites over the water, flying contests with prizes for categories like highest flying and best design, live music, and activities for children. Nothing is ticketed.
It is the answer to a question people ask a lot here, which is what there is to do on the coast in early spring before the summer calendar starts. This is it, and it costs nothing.
What is the BeachLife Festival?
A three day music festival on the Redondo Beach waterfront in early May, staged at Seaside Lagoon with the ocean behind the stages. It started in 2019 and has run annually since, with a daily capacity of roughly 11,000. It is the largest ticketed event on this stretch of coast and it books national headliners rather than local acts.
What makes it a genuinely local event rather than a festival that happens to be here is the siting. The stages face the water, the layout runs along the harbor, and a large share of the audience walks or rides in from the neighborhoods around it. It also runs a separate food and drink program built around South Bay restaurants and breweries.
Practical notes for anyone living nearby: the Redondo waterfront parking structures fill, Harbor Drive and Catalina Avenue carry the traffic, and the sound carries across the harbor and up into the Hollywood Riviera on a clear evening. Residents either buy tickets or plan the weekend around it, and both are reasonable choices.
There is a separate autumn edition in some years. Check the organizer rather than assuming the May dates are the only ones.
What is the International Surf Festival?
A week of competition in late July and early August that runs across four cities at once: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and Torrance.
It is unusual for being genuinely regional rather than belonging to one city, and it is the clearest annual expression of the fact that these beach towns function as one coastline with four city halls.
What is the 6-Man?
The Charlie Saikley 6-Man Beach Volleyball Tournament, held on the south side of the Manhattan Beach pier in late July or early August.
Six players a side instead of the usual two, costumes, team names, and a crowd. It is a local institution rather than a professional event, and it is one of the days Manhattan Beach is busiest all year.
Where are the free summer concerts?
Four separate series, in four cities, most of them free.
- Manhattan Beach, Polliwog Park. Sundays 5pm to 7pm, running from early July to early September.
- Torrance Summer Nights. Saturdays from June through mid September, mostly at the Wilson Park Amphitheater.
- El Segundo, Library Park. Concerts start at 4:30pm with food trucks from 4pm.
- Hermosa Beach. A short series south of the pier on the two Sundays following Labor Day weekend, which makes it the one that extends the season after everything else has finished.
Bring a low chair. Most of these fill.
Where are the 4th of July fireworks?
Redondo Beach, over King Harbor. That is the big one, and it is the answer most people are looking for.
Manhattan Beach does not have a fireworks show. Worth stating plainly, because people assume the beach city with the pier must have one and then find out on the day. Manhattan Beach runs daytime events instead, including a pool party at Begg Pool.
Other South Bay cities including El Segundo, Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes and San Pedro run their own Independence Day celebrations, and formats vary. Some have moved away from traditional fireworks in recent years, so check the city rather than assuming.
If you are choosing where to watch, the harbor is the anchor. If you are choosing where to live and this matters to you, it is worth knowing which side of that you are on.
What is the Pumpkin Race?
Manhattan Beach does not run a Fourth of July fireworks show, which surprises people. What it does run, and has for more than three decades, is a pumpkin race.
Each October the Manhattan Beach Chamber of Commerce closes part of downtown and turns the area near the pier into what it calls Pumpkin Race Land. Competitors fit wheels to pumpkins and race them down Manhattan Beach Boulevard. The 2026 edition was the 36th annual, held on 18 October, which puts the first one around 1990. It is free, it starts at midday, and it runs as a day-long Downtown Halloween Festival with activities alongside the racing.
You can build a racer on the day. That is the part most people do not realize, and it is why the event has lasted: it is a participation event rather than a spectator one.
It falls in the same month as the Manhattan Beach Hometown Fair, so early October and mid October are both busy weekends in that downtown. If you live nearby, plan parking around both.
The Pumpkin Race is one date on a much longer October calendar. The full list, with verified dates, times and locations, is on the Halloween in the South Bay page.
What happens in December?
Two things, and they are both worth building an evening around.
The King Harbor Holiday Boat Parade sends decorated boats through the harbor under the theme Light up the Harbor, organized by the King Harbor Yacht Club. Free to watch from the shore, no boat or membership needed, typically a Saturday in mid December.
The Sleepy Hollow Christmas Lights in Torrance turn a residential neighborhood into a drive-through and walk-through display through December. Robert Road, Reese Road, Sharynne Lane and Doris Way carry most of it, reached from Pacific Coast Highway at Calle Mayor. Participation is voluntary and changes year to year.
When is the South Bay busiest?
Memorial Day weekend, the last week of July into the first week of August, and Labor Day weekend.
Those three windows carry Fiesta Hermosa twice, the Surf Festival and the 6-Man. If you are moving during one of them, plan the truck around it. If you are listing a property near a pier, plan the photography around it too.
The flip side is that these weekends are what people mean when they say they want to live here, so there is a version of this where you stop fighting the calendar and lean into it.
Go deeper on these
Three parts of the calendar have enough going on to need their own page.
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Continue exploring
Compiled from city parks and recreation listings and event organizer announcements, verified September 15, 2026. Dates move every year and some events change format or pause entirely. Confirm with the organizer or the city before making plans around any of these.
Have a question about this? Neil answers personally.