The last weekend of July will once again play host to the Gilroy Garlic Festival, as organizers have announced the event is back on after a five-year hiatus, though this year’s return iteration will be quite small compared to the event’s heyday.It was technically not the 2019 mass shooting which killed three people and injured another 17 that ended the long-running NorCal tradition known as the Gilroy Garlic Festival, though that certainly played a role. The festival did actually return in 2021 as a “drive-through” event where people stayed in their cars, though organizers called it quits in 2022, noting that insurance costs were much higher post-shooting, and also the event had been losing money for years. A sort-of rival replacement event called the California Garlic Festival attempted to take its place in Stockton in 2022-23 and then Los Banos in 2024, but that event never hit the critical mass of cult fandom of the original Gilroy event. But Monterey’s KSBW reports that the Gilroy Garlic Festival is returning in 2025. The announcement came in a Friday Facebook post on the official Gilroy Garlic Festival Facebook page, which elicited a great deal of joy, though a smattering of complaints about the festival being very much downscaled, and at a different location.“The Gilroy Garlic Festival Association is pleased to announce the return of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, taking place July 25th, 26th, and 27th, 2025. The event will be held at Gilroy Gardens in Gilroy, California,” the announcement says. “This year’s festival will be a limited-capacity experience, welcoming up to 3,000 guests per day. Guests can expect signature garlic dishes, live entertainment, arts and crafts, and the cherished traditions that have long made this event a community favorite.”So it’s still a three-day festival, and it’s still the last weekend of July. But that 3,000-person-a-day cutoff is obviously a huge reduction in size, and there will only be advance ticket sales, no sales at the door. The festival had been drawing 100,000 attendees over three days, according to the Chronicle, and in 2011 set a record with 109,067 attendees. And as noted in that statement, this year’s Gilroy Garlic Festival will be held at an amusement park called Gilroy Gardens. The location switch is understable, as many people likely have very traumatic memories of the previous location Christmas Hill Park after that 2019 shooting.  The statement also adds, “This event will be held at the South County Picnic Grove at Gilroy Gardens and will require a separate entry from the theme park.” So… do attendees have to pay amusement park admission, and then another separate admission to attend the Garlic Festival? That’s not clear, and there's a great deal about this festival not yet revealed in this pretty threadbare announcement. (Like, will there be a Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival pageant again? And are the garlic ice cream people coming back?)Still, this is excellent news from the city of Gilroy, even if the event is a fraction of the size of its former incarnation.  And as for the rival California Garlic Festival, there is no date or announcement for 2025 on that festival’s website.Related: Gilroy Garlic Festival Is Kaput After 43 Years, and One Mass Shooting [SFist]Image: People lined up to buy garlic ice cream at the 2007 Garlic Festival, Gilroy, California. (Getty Images) ...read more read less