A review of optical fiber sensing demonstrations based on photonic crystal fibers is presented. The text is organized in five main sections: the first three deal with sensing approaches relying on fiber Bragg gratings, long-period gratings and interferometric structures; the fourth one reports applications of these fibers for gas and liquid sensing; finally, the last section focuses on the exploitation of nonlinear effects in photonic crystal fibers for sensing. A brief review about splicing with photonic crystal fibers is also included.Two main classes of photonic crystal fibres (PCF): index-guiding PCF (a) and photonic bandgap PCF (b).