Just over a month after the start of the Southwest Washington Fair in the beginning of August, preliminary attendance numbers show fair attendance waned a bit this year while the second act at the local fairgrounds, the Washington State Garlic Fest, took another leap in attendance.
Lewis County Fair and Events Manager Fionna Velazquez released some unofficial numbers to The Chronicle this week about the two biggest events held at the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds each year.
According to Velazquez, the fair attracted 85,367 visitors across its six days and also featured 7,836 exhibits submitted by 974 exhibitors. Exhibits can range from animals to still-life entries.
The numbers show Southwest Washington Fair diminished slightly from attendance and exhibit numbers the year before, but remained above the lows recorded in the immediate wake of COVID-19 lockdown.
While overall numbers were slightly down, Velazquez celebrated that the fair had its largest opening day in more than a decade with just over 12,000 visitors attending the fair on Tuesday alone.
Last year for the 2025 Southwest Washington Fair, the event saw 87,369 attendees and the year before saw 88,300. The fair attracted around 72,000 people in 2023 and 79,000 in 2022. Exhibit numbers also dropped this year compared to last year, which saw 1,000 exhibitors submit more than 8,500 exhibits for the fair.
However, the numbers remained above the 2024 totals, which showed fewer than 7,000 exhibits from around 918 exhibitors.
While the Southwest Washington Fair shows numbers flattening out over the last three years, the Washington State Garlic Fest is exploding by comparison.
According to Velazquez, the Garlic Fest saw just over 9,000 attendees this year.
That’s a roughly 4,000-person increase compared with 2025’s event, which recorded around 5,000 attendees. In 2023, the fest saw even fewer visitors at 3,776 people.
“That represents an increase of nearly 80% over last year and more than double the attendance from two years ago,” Velazquez said. “We also saw growth in vendor participation this year.”
The fair office is still compiling data from the Southwest Washington Fair and the Washington State Garlic Fest to include overall revenue, the number of vendors and ticket sale numbers for the many events within the fair.
