St. Paul's Carnival is an annual Caribbean Carnival held, usually on the first Saturday of July, in St. Paul's, Bristol, England. The celebration began in 1968 as the St. Paul's Festival, in order to improve relationships between the European, African, Caribbean, and Asian inhabitants of the area.

Called the St. Paul's Carnival since 1991, the event includes a masquerade procession with ornate and colourful costumes and floats from local schools and cultural associations, a stage for professional performers, sound systems in neighbouring streets and a range of stalls selling food from a wide range of cultures. In the preceding period, Mas camps create costumes for the parade and there is a week of cultural events in the days before carnival.

The carnival started in 1968 as a multi-cultural event. The initial organisers were the St. Paul's and Environs Consultative Committee and the West Indian Development Association, aided by the vicar of St Agnes Church and Carmen Beckford, Bristol's first community development worker. Local residents and activists wanted to bring together the European, African-Caribbean and Asian communities, and wanted to challenge negative stereotypes of the area. Originally it was a community event with local residents selling home-cooked food from their front gardens.

Researcher Thomas Fleming said that "By the mid-1970s the event (now called the 'St. Paul's Festival') was indulging in an extravagant multiculturalism that celebrated in the juxtaposition of Latvian singers and Scottish dancers, steel bands and weightlifting competitions."

This approach was to change over the next few years, particularly when the St. Paul's Festival Committee elected Trinidadian Francis Salandy as chair in July 1979. He took over from Alfredo Vasquez who had been one of the main organisers of the Festival for the previous two years; Vasquez was elected Secretary and for the next twenty years held key posts on the committee (Secretary and Treasurer).

Salandy shifted the festival from multi-cultural celebrations of the various communities living in the St. Paul's neighbourhood to providing a platform for African and Caribbean artists. He insisted that the Black community had to be central to the decision-making because he did not want St. Paul's Festival to be "purely an exercise in community relations by White people who usually assumed a controlling role and decided what the Black community wanted".

Salandy brought Trinidadian-style mas camp and procession to St. Paul's Festival but insisted on keeping up the tradition of booking steel bands. One of his first actions was to use his contacts with the organisers of the Notting Hill Carnival to invite London's Ebony Steelband to Bristol.

Under Salandy's leadership, St. Paul's Festival remained a community event while becoming a consciousness-raising platform, reflecting messages of social justice, Black identity and liberation. This was reflected in the choice of films, talks and artists, as well as the Festival themes such as 'Survival' (1979), 'Resistance' (1980) and 'Not Guilty' (1981).