Adelaide Bridge

Adelaide Fringe, formerly Adelaide Fringe Festival, is Australia's biggest arts festival and is the world's second-largest annual arts festival (after the Edinburgh Festival Fringe), held in the South Australian capital of Adelaide. Between mid-February and mid-March each year, it features more than 7,000 artists from around Australia and the world. Over 1,300 events are staged in hundreds of venues, which include work in a huge variety of performing and visual art forms. The Fringe features many free events occur alongside ticketed events for the duration of the festival. In 2023 Adelaide Fringe became the first festival in Australia to sell 1 million tickets. This has doubled from 500,000 tickets in 2015. The main temporary venue hubs are The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Gluttony and the Wonderland and 500 other temporary and permanent venues hosting Fringe events are scattered across the city, suburbs and region. In a period in Adelaide's calendar referred to by locals as "Mad March", other events running concurrently are the Adelaide Festival of Arts, another major arts festival starting a week after the Fringe, which includes Adelaide Writers' Week and the four-day world music festival WOMADelaide, and also the Adelaide 500 street circuit motor racing event, with accompanying evening music concerts. The Fringe attracts many international visitors as well as from all over Australia, and in 2019 generated an estimated A$95.1 million in gross economic expenditure for South Australia, which included A$36.6 million in spending by the 2.7 million attendees. Each year has brought a new record in all aspects of the festival for many years up to 2020. Founded in 1960 as a loose collection of official (coordinated by the Festival of Arts) and unofficial events run by local artists, and initially seen as adjunct to the main Festival of Arts, the Fringe became an incorporated body in 1975, with the 1976 festival named Focus and later Adelaide Festival Fringe, before the 1992 change to Adelaide Fringe Festival. It has grown from a two-week long, biennial festival to a major annual international festival. The Edinburgh Award, worth A$10,000, was introduced by Arts South Australia in 2017, open to local Adelaide Fringe artists who wish to tour their work to the Edinburgh Fringe.