Waterford crowned ‘City of Christmas’
INTERNATIONALLY renowned mentalist Keith Barry has hailed the festive magic conjured up by his home town.
Waterford is walking in a winter wonderland after being crowned the European City of Christmas 2024 this week thanks to its iconic Winterval Festival.
The seasonal bonanza, which kicked off on Friday, has attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors annually since its first edition in 2012, making it Ireland’s biggest Christmas festival, with this year looking set to be the best yet.
Magician and Waterford man Barry said the award puts the city on the ‘national and global map’.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘To attract visitors from outside Waterford is really important. Waterford sometimes is like the forgotten city and it doesn’t get the full attention it deserves.
‘It [the festival] brings out the people of Waterford and it’s a special moment for them to have the city so well-decorated; it also puts Waterford on a national, and now global, map.
‘Winning this award will just inspire the organisers to make it even better and encourage the people of Waterford to keep supporting Winterval.’
Barry, who has toured across the US and Europe in a career spanning three decades, performed a daring escape act at his home-town festival in 2014 and described it as an ‘amazing experience’.
He said: ‘We had a regulation straitjacket and my twist on this was that my head got wrapped with cling film so I couldn’t breathe. Then they hiked me 150 feet up in the air.
‘My job is to fill theatres all over Europe and the States, so normally I’m used to playing to anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people, but the time I got involved, 10,000 people turned up on the streets of Waterford.
‘It was both nerve-wracking and surreal as someone born and bred in Waterford and performing to the biggest audience I had ever played to.’