Festival City: Mount Dora’s Year, From the Arts Festival to the Christmas Walk
More than thirty festivals a year in a town of Mount Dora's size is not a calendar, it's a personality. The February arts peak, the Scottish games, blueberry season and the December lights — planned in order.
3 minute read
They call Mount Dora Festival City, and the numbers back the nickname: more than thirty festivals and major events a year, in a small historic downtown that closes its streets, fills its parks and feeds the crowds from its own restaurants. You can visit on a quiet weekend and love the place — but the festivals are when Mount Dora is most itself. Here is the year, in the order a planner needs it.
February: the peak
The Mount Dora Arts Festival is the headline: a juried fine-arts festival run by the Mount Dora Center for the Arts, held on the streets of historic downtown on the first full weekend of February. First held in 1975, it now brings about 300 national artists into white tents across the downtown grid, competing for cash prizes in 2D, 3D and Best in Show categories, with an emerging-artist section near the food court. It is free to attend, draws enormous crowds for a town this size, and turns the whole district into an open-air gallery. February stacks around it: Renninger’s Antique Extravaganza weekends land in the same season (see our antiques guide), and the Mount Dora Scottish Highland Festival brings Highland athletics, pipes and drums, society tents and re-enactment camps to Donnelly Park and Elizabeth Evans Park later in the month.
Spring and the rest of the year
Spring answers with the Mount Dora Blueberry Festival in Donnelly Park — a celebration of Central Florida’s blueberry farms with more than a hundred vendors and everything blueberry, from fresh berries to pie, shortcake and blueberry wine — and the Spring Festival of Arts and Crafts downtown. Through the year the pattern continues: craft fairs, music in Donnelly Park (the town’s 1924 central green, at 530 N Donnelly St, built for exactly this), and seasonal weekends that give regulars a reason to return in a different month. The Chamber of Commerce’s annual-festivals listing is the source to confirm any given year’s dates before booking.
December: the lights
The year ends lit. Light Up Mount Dora switches on the town’s holiday display — by local accounts some two million lights — in late November, and the first weekend of December layers the Christmas Walk, a free downtown street party with music, street entertainment and shops open late around Sunset Park, followed by the Christmas Parade and the lighted boat parade on Lake Dora. If you visit for one December event, make it the Walk, and stay for dinner: the restaurants in our dining guide are at their most festive, and reservations matter most.
The bookends: January and New Year’s Eve
The festival year effectively starts in January, when Renninger’s winter Antique Extravaganza brings its hundreds of dealers to the US-441 grounds and the town warms up for February. It ends on the lake: Mount Dora’s listed New Year’s Eve celebration brings live music, food and fireworks over Lake Dora, closing the same waterfront that opened the year. In between, the through-line is Donnelly Park — the 1924 green at the center of downtown that hosts everything from Highland athletics to blueberry vendors to holiday concerts, with Elizabeth Evans Park and Sunset Park taking the overflow. Learn those three parks and you have learned the town’s festival geography; everything else is a street closure and a crowd away.
How to festival well
Three rules from the regulars. Arrive early — downtown parking fills by mid-morning on headline weekends, and the Arts Festival rewards the first hours, when you can actually talk to artists. Book rooms and dinners before the calendar announces your weekend to everyone else; the Lakeside Inn sits inside the festival footprint. And build in a quiet hour: the Palm Island boardwalk at the end of a festival day is the reset the crowds skip. For the non-festival version of town, see our Mount Dora guide — and find the festival parks on the Orlando Top Spots Map.
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