Easter Monday

Easter Monday is the exhale at the end of the Easter weekend — a statutory public holiday Trinbagonians spend almost entirely outdoors. If Good Friday is for church and kites and Easter Sunday is for family lunch, Monday is for the beach, the river, and the last day of a four-day weekend used properly.

When is Easter Monday?

Easter Monday follows Easter Sunday, moving with the Christian calendar each year — the table above has the confirmed dates. It's a full statutory holiday under the Public Holidays and Festivals Act: banks, schools, government offices and most businesses stay closed, extending the break that Good Friday opened.

Beach day, properly done

The coasts fill early. Maracas Bay's bake and shark shacks do some of their briskest business of the year, Las Cuevas and Blanchisseuse pack out along the north coast, and the south coast fills at Quinam and Mayaro. In Tobago, Store Bay and Pigeon Point absorb both locals and the Easter visitor wave. If you want a parking spot at Maracas on Easter Monday, leave Port of Spain before eight.

Kites, rivers and the bush

Kite season peaks across the Easter weekend, and Monday is its last big day — parks and savannahs stay full of kites, and some communities run informal competitions judged on height, design and the quality of the kite's "singing," the hum made by paper stretched across a notch in the frame. River limes are the other great Monday institution: families set up at Northern Range rivers with coolers and pots, combining a freshwater swim with a cook-up under the trees. It's arguably the most Trinidadian form of leisure there is.

The end of Lent, the return of the fête

Easter Monday also flips the social calendar back on. The Lenten quiet that followed Carnival ends, and promoters launch the first wave of post-Lent events from Easter Monday evening — a mini season that runs until exam time in June. The contrast is the point: a morning on the river, an evening in a fête, and back to work on Tuesday.

Planning around it

Because Good Friday and Easter Monday are both statutory holidays, the Easter weekend is the most reliable long break of the year — no leave required. If you can add the following week's days, the school calendar's Easter break usually sits adjacent, making it the best window of the year for family travel without touching August. See the year pages for exactly how each Easter lands.