View an exclusive gallery of the events from the Lonely Planet book, below left.

From colourful parades to grungy music events, festivals are living, dancing museums of cultures and traditions.

For travellers, there can be no better way to understand a country than by getting down and partying with fellow festivalgoers, at an event where they celebrate what makes them unique.

Taking place around the globe and around the calendar, festivals reflect the world's diversity. Our selection ranges from Mexico's famous Day of the Dead to obscurer gatherings featuring bungee jumping or towering chariots, including a series of events taking place over the coming weeks and months.

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• Gallery from A Year of Festivals

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The best world music festivals and destinations, selected by the editor of Songlines magazine

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Britain's 20 best summer music festivals 2008

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Multimedia

• Gallery from A Year of Festivals

If you feel inspired to get festive but can't afford a flight to a far-flung destination, take a trip to Ireland's very own Galway Oyster Festival.

Festival in the Desert, Mali (January)

For three days a year, a desolate patch of Saharan sand, 65km north of Timbuktu, hosts 'the world's most remote music festival'. That's what the Festival in the Desert bills itself as, and it's a credible claim. The sandy site is half a day's jeep ride - or three days by camel if you have a tough derrière - from a town that is itself synonymous with inaccessibility.

The event dates back centuries to gatherings where Tuaregs, the turban-wrapped Saharan nomads, would converge to race camels, show off their swordsmanship and exchange news on the desert grapevine. The Tuareg band Tinariwen consolidated these fireside get-togethers into a World Music event, and intrepid music buffs are intrigued by a gig that attracts the likes of Robert Plant and Manu Chau to the middle of nowhere.

Venice Carnival, Italy (February)

The high point in Venice's social calendar, Carnevale is a masked extravaganza, and your chance to spend 12 days looking like Phantom of the Opera. The world's best-known baroque fancy-dress party, it's as extravagant as Rio's Carnaval is riotous, celebrating the approach of spring with refined gusto.

Venetians have been celebrating Carnevale since at least the 15th century. In those days private clubs organised masked balls, and popular entertainment included such gentle fun as bull-baiting and firing live dogs from cannons.

Today, there's a procession of decorated boats and gondolas, jousts and mock military tournaments, calcio storico (a medieval approximation of football in period costume) and of course, the Grand Masked Ball.

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