The patron saint of Favara is Saint Anthony of Padua, celebrated on 13 June in the church dedicated to him. Despite this, the town's main religious feast is that in honour of Saint Joseph: the celebration, held not on 19 March but between August and September, is linked to the traditional cooking of the Minestra di San Giuseppe, prepared with several kinds of pasta and vegetables.
In the Norman period the Chiaramonte castle arose, built around 1270 as a hunting residence for Frederick II of Swabia: quadrilateral in plan, with sides about 31 metres long, it is entered from the south through a large ogival portal leading into a wide courtyard, with barrel-vaulted ceilings on the ground floor and the residential floor above. Passed in the 14th century to the Chiaramonte family, from whom it takes its name, the castle today sits alongside the Farm Cultural Park, an art gallery founded in 2010 inside the Cortile Bentivegna, a cluster of small Arab-derived palaces in the old town centre.
