See 70,000 people gather in Nevada desert for Burning Man 2016

Tens of thousands of people from all over the world descended on Nevada's Black Rock Desert for the 30th annual Burning Man arts and music festival, a week-long gathering that wrapped up on Monday. Scroll down to check out some highlights from this year's festival.

Not your typical festival.

The first Burning Man festival took place in 1986 when two friends built an improvised wooden figure, dragged it down to a San Francisco beach and set it on fire. A small but curious crowd of no more than a few dozen people gathered to watch it burn. 

Since then, the festival has grown bigger each year and exploded in popularity, drawing more than 50,000 people for the first time in 2010 with approximately 70,000 participants turning out this year.

Building Black Rock City.

What makes Burning Man unique is that festival-goers aren't mere spectators. Rather, "participants join in the effort to co-create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis dedicated to art and community." 

'A full-fledged, thriving temporary metropolis.' 

"The people who make up Black Rock City are not simply 'attendees,' but rather active participants in every sense of the word: they create the city, the interaction, the art, the performance and ultimately the experience that is Burning Man." 

Here, Dario Clocchiatti looks for a book at one of the temporary libraries set up in Black Rock City.

The 10 Principles of Burning Man.

Participation is key to the culture of Burning Man and is included among the festival's 10 principles, which were crafted by co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004. Other principles include gifting, decommodification, radical inclusion, self-reliance and self-expression.

Burning Man 2016: Da Vinci's Workshop.

The theme of this year's festival is inspired by the Italian Renaissance painter Leonardo Da Vinci. This year's Burning Man effigy was modelled after Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. 

'The man' burns …

The culmination of the Burning Man festival is the symbolic ritual burning of a large wooden figure referred to as "the man."

… And this is what's left of him.

Participants pick for scraps among the remains of the man after it was burned.

Leaving no trace. 

With so much artistic destruction and so many participants, it's easy to imagine one giant mess in the desert at the end of the week-long festival. 

But organizers have made a commitment to respect the environment and leave no physical trace wherever the gathering takes place. "We clean up after ourselves and endeavour, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them."