The Carnival of Cultures, which takes place in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, is a multicultural festival that has been celebrated around the Whitsun weekend every year since 1996. Berlin's vibrant carnival is an international, peaceful celebration of diversity, openness and tolerance, with parades, music, dance, theatre, exotic food and drink and all kinds of arts and crafts.

Christopher Street Day (CSD) and ColognePride bring colourful parades, extravagant outfits and fever-pitch excitement to the streets – a huge, vibrant festival enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people but with a very serious message. Every year, when gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders descend on Cologne with their high spirits and good humour, they are demonstrating for homosexuals' rights and for acceptance, tolerance and equality.

Every September, Stuttgart hosts the Cannstatter Wasen, Baden-Württemberg's largest festival and one that is ranked as the second-biggest beer festival worldwide after Munich's Oktoberfest. Swabians have a reputation for frugality, but the Cannstatter Wasen shows them in a very different light – as happy, friendly, fun-loving folk with a sense of tradition.

Bremen locals might have a reputation as reserved north Germans rather than party animals, but every year the Bremen Freimarkt dispels that myth. More than four million people enjoy all the funfair entertainment and music, with dancing in the streets, excitement in the air and merriment in the beer tents and inns around Bremen's beautiful old quarter.

You know it's carnival time in Cologne when odd things start to happen. From the moment the mayor hands power to a trio consisting of a prince, a peasant and a maiden, this cathedral city in North Rhine-Westphalia is turned on its head. In the week before Ash Wednesday you'll have Kölle alaaf ringing in your ears and wonder if people have taken leave of their senses.

" Düsseldorf Helau! " Once Düsseldorf's carnival is under way, there's no holding back the revellers, the rhyming orators and the festive hordes in this Rhineland city in North Rhine-Westphalia . Düsseldorf's jokers perpetrate their tricks every year from 11 November until Ash Wednesday the following year.

The Hanse Sail regatta in Rostock , capital of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , was the result of a great sea change. During the first summer after German reunification, the town and the region hosted the first Hanse Sail to celebrate the freedom of their reopened sea borders. Every year since 1991, this big, exciting maritime festival has attracted up to a million visitors to Rostock's shores.