The town's annual fiesta patronal takes place in late January each year and is famous for its dances, including one that recreates a legendary battle between the Achi and the K'iche Maya, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural monument, known as The Rabinal Achí.
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During the mid-19th century Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, serving as Parish Priest, conducts some of the first ethnographic studies of the highland Maya and collects folk tales and documents making the first translations into European languages, of the Rabinal Achí.
On 2 September 1996, Ombudsman Jorge Mario García Laguardia issued a historic resolution in which he denounced the massacre of Plan de Sánchez (and two others that took place in Rabinal the same year: Chichupac and Río Negro) as crimes against humanity, laid the blame for them firmly at the feet of the government and the military, and said that they had been carried out as part of a premeditated state policy.