CentrO Family Festival Neue Mitte

24 Years of Family Festival at Westfield Centro

The CentrO Family Festival is one of the oldest and largest city family festivals in the Ruhr area. First conceived in 2002 as a special event during the early years of Centro, it has become a firm annual fixture and will celebrate its 24th edition in 2026. The venue is not just the shopping center itself, but the entire Neue Mitte Oberhausen — Centro promenade, Coca-Cola Hall, the area around Sea Life, and the Gasometer line.

Date 2026 — Sunday, October 4

The 24th edition falls on Sunday, October 4, 2026 — the first Sunday in October and thus the classic autumn family date in the Ruhr area. Centro shops will be open from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM. The family festival program begins concurrently and runs throughout the day across the Centro grounds.

Live Music, Walking Acts, and Hands-On Activities

The family festival focuses on three program axes:

• Live Music on several stages along the promenade — bands, solo artists, acoustic sets, often including children's choir and school performances from Oberhausen and the surrounding area.
• Walking Acts animate the open Centro promenade — stilt walkers, clowns, jugglers, living statues, interactive characters for children to engage with.
• Hands-on Activities form the family axis — craft stations, face painting booths, bouncy castles, mini sports courses, traffic education, animal contact stations with the animal welfare society, free face painting, and children's activities offered by the Centro tenants themselves.

Sunday Shopping at Germany's Largest Shopping Center

The CentrO Family Festival also serves as the central Sunday shopping event for Oberhausen in the autumn. From 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM, the Centro shops open — over 220 brands across approximately 70,000 m² of retail space. Centro is one of Germany's largest shopping centers and has been marketed under the Westfield brand by the French-Dutch Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield group since 2018. Sunday openings are the exception in Germany — the family festival provides the legal basis for it.

Neue Mitte — Oberhausen's Tourist Magnet

Neue Mitte Oberhausen was developed in the 1990s on a former industrial site (Thyssen steelworks) as a complete urban district with Centro, Coca-Cola Hall (concert venue), theater, Sea Life, Aquapark, the distinctive Gasometer Oberhausen, and the König-Pilsener-Arena. With around 23 million visitors annually, it is the most visited single location in the Ruhr area — one of the few examples in Germany of an artificially created urban center that has established itself as a tourist destination. For one day a year, the CentrO Family Festival explicitly transforms this space of consumption and experience into a family stage.