Malaga Christmas Lights Switch-On Set for 27 November Malaga's Christmas lights switch on on Friday 27 November, with Calle Larios repeating its 'Navidad de luz' theme and a new design of red garlands and baubles for 2026. Malaga has set the date for the start of its Christmas season. The city's festive lights, among the most photographed in Spain, will switch on on Friday 27 November, the last Friday of the month, as they have done for years. The centrepiece, as ever, will be Calle Larios. The city's grandest shopping street will once again carry the theme 'Navidad de luz', with the canopy of light that has made the street a winter fixture for photographers, cruise passengers and local families alike. The 2026 design keeps the overall concept but adds a visible change: red garlands and baubles now dress each column, bringing a splash of colour to a display that has leaned heavily on white and gold in recent editions. The finishing touches are already being fitted. Installation crews spent this week on ladders along the main stretch of the street, and the decorations already dominate the historic centre even with three weeks to go before the switch-on. In late October, lamp posts along the street were already wrapped in decorative garlands as the structure went up section by section. Behind the display stands a three-year contract, awarded to a lighting company from Cordoba, worth more than 1.3 million euros. The agreement covers the installation, hire and maintenance of the decorative lighting for Malaga's Christmas and, notably, for the Carnaval de Malaga in 2027, when parts of the same structure will be reused and adapted rather than built again. The scale of the operation is easy to underestimate. The specifications set out a total of 27 different types of decorative lighting across the city, from transverse arches and LED curtains to plant-themed mesh displays and garlands designed to dress the natural trees along the streets. The contract even fixes the height of the fir-shaped tree in Plaza de la Constitucion, which must stand at least 12 metres tall and no more than 19, and it covers the video-mapping projections that have accompanied recent editions, projected onto the south tower of the cathedral. The programme also reaches beyond the old town. In the Cruz del Humilladero district, light arches and lamppost decorations will be installed, designed from the outset to be reused for the carnival without a second installation, which is quieter both for the district's residents and for the city budget. One question remains open: the exact shape of opening night. Because the switch-on date falls at the end of the election campaign, the city has not yet confirmed whether there will be an official ceremony with the crowds of previous years or whether the lights will simply come alive with the first scheduled light-and-music display. In recent editions the Larios canopy has run several choreographed passes each evening, combining the arches of light with music and, in some years, artificial snow, and the exact display times are due to be published closer to the date. For visitors planning around the lights, a few practical points hold true every year. The switch-on evening and the weekends that follow are the busiest, with locals and tourists packing the pedestrian streets around Larios, Plaza de la Constitucion and Calle Granada. Midweek evenings in early December offer the same display with a fraction of the crowd, and the lights typically stay on into early January, through the season's closing celebrations. The lights have become an economic event as much as a visual one. Hotels in the centre fill their cheapest rooms for the switch-on weekend, restaurants along the old town extend their terraces, and day-trippers from the rest of the Costa del Sol time their Christmas shopping around an evening walk under the canopy. For a city that has spent the last twenty years turning its historic centre into one of southern Europe's most convincing Christmas destinations, the date is now the least surprising news of the season. On 27 November, Calle Larios will glow again, this time with a little more red in the gold, and Malaga will once again do what it has turned into an art form: start Christmas with a light show in the street.