Portal:Holidays

Burning Man is an eight-day-long festival organized by Black Rock City, LLC, under the guidance of founder Larry Harvey. The festival is held annually and ends on the American Labor Day holiday in September. The festival takes place on the playa of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, 90 miles (150 km) north-northeast of Reno. Though the specific location on the playa changes from year to year, the location has been quite constant in recent years. The temporary city is an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance. The event takes its name from the ritual of burning a large wooden sculpture of a man on the sixth day.

The annual event now known as Burning Man began on the summer solstice in 1986 when Larry Harvey, Jerry James, and a few friends met on Baker Beach in San Francisco and burned an eight foot (2.4 m) tall wooden man as well as a smaller wooden dog. The inspiration for burning these effigy figures has been explained by Harvey as "a spontaneous act of radical self-expression."

Christopher Columbus was a navigator and maritime explorer credited as the discoverer of the Americas. He had noted in his lifetime that he was born in Genoa, Italy. His birth name was Cristoforo Colombo. He eventually became an admiral for the Crown of Castile. Columbus' voyages across the Atlantic Ocean began a European effort at exploration and colonization of the Western Hemisphere. The anniversary of the 1492 voyage, Columbus Day, is observed throughout the Americas and in Spain.