[2] The festival consists of religious processions and street-parades, showcasing themed floats, dancing groups wearing colorful costumes, marching bands, and people sporting face and body paints.

The street parade is known as Sadsad, which is also what the locals call their way of dancing where the foot is momentarily dragged along the ground in tune to the beat played by the marching bands.

It was part of the Catholic "fiesta system" employed by the Spanish colonial government to reinforce the reducciones policy that aimed to resettle natives on planned settlements built around a local church.

In the 1950s, the festival, along with similar fiestas around the country celebrating the Santo Niño (like the Sinulog and Dinagyang) increasingly began to resemble the Brazilian Carnival and the New Orleans Mardi Gras, incorporating music, street dancing, and body painting.

[5] The festivity is claimed to be originally a native animist celebration of the anito (ancestor spirits), to which Spanish missionaries gradually added a Christian meaning.

Datu Puti made a trade with the Ati people and purchased the lowlands for a golden salakot, brass basins and bales of cloth.

The first edition of the UNESCO-backed book included the Ati-atihan Festival, signifying its great importance to Philippine intangible cultural heritage.

The local government of Aklan, in cooperation with the NCCA, is given the right to nominate the Ati-atihan Festival in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists.

Other towns in Aklan that celebrate the Ati-Atihan festival are Ibajay, Lezo, Malinao, Makato, Batan, Altavas, and Malay (Boracay Island).