The Battle of Flowers parade is nothing new to San Antonians. For more than 130 years, the founding Fiesta event has traipsed through the Alamo City, leaving glitter and handmade flowers in its wake. However, this year there’s a nearly nine-foot surprise waiting in an unsuspecting warehouse on the city’s Eastside.
MySA visited a few weeks before the parade while local high schoolers were seeing the floats they’d ride on for the first time. Every four years, each public high school in the San Antonio area will get the chance to send students to the parade — and the process from design to the big day pretty much kicks off as soon as the previous Fiesta is over.
In the warehouse were 10 storybook-inspired floats on the “From Pages To Possibilities” theme. Among the decorations were a glittering, seven-foot likeness of Frankenstein’s monster on the slab, a flying monkey straight from The Wizard of Oz, a patriotic Independence Day float and the scene of an alien abduction. But organizers at the warehouse told MySA there’s one float in particular to watch out for: the Greek mythology float. Its centerpiece, a nearly nine-foot Poseidon statue, features almost six pounds of glitter and had to be brought in on its own flatbed truck. One organizer said it’s one of the largest pieces to be on a float in recent history.
“This year we’re really excited about Poseidon on the Greek mythology float,” Battle of Flowers public school chairman Mallory Ahl told MySA. “He is eight-and-a-half feet tall and really just has an amazing presence. These glitter objects on the floats are handmade, hand-glued and take a really long time for our float builder to do, and Poseidon is definitely just a work of art.”
Organizers told MySA there are a total of 12,000 flowers on the 26 official Battle of Flowers Association floats and many more across the 54 floats in the parade. Many of them are recycled from previous years or come from Amols‘, a 77-year-old Fiesta and party store on Fredericksburg Road. According to Ahl, students first saw a sketch of the floats in October 2025 and have been working to gather costumes, choose music and choreograph their moves in the months since.
On the day of the parade, floats begin lining up outside the warehouse around 4 a.m., getting into order between 5 and 7 a.m. Then the students will begin to arrive, and the parade will get underway around 10:30 a.m
While parade regulars will know what to expect, the freshness comes with each year’s new theme. However, 2026 also marks the first time electric vehicles will pull some of the floats, according to one organizer.
The 2026 Battle of Flowers parade kicks off on the morning of Friday, April 24, starting at East Locust Street and Main Avenue and ending at the intersection of North Santa Rosa Street at West Martin Street. According to the parade website, it attracts more than 350,000 spectators each year, making it one of the biggest Fiesta events.