The best times to visit Hobart

Hobart’s days as a one-trick seasonal pony are long gone. Once a city that pulled down the shutters at summer’s end, the Tasmanian capital now embraces every season. Thousands take to the water for a nude winter swim, and even more join an ad hoc autumn mountain pilgrimage to witness a tree change colour.

Hobart’s cultural calendar is long and varied, and one of the city’s great pleasures is its seasonal variation: the 16 hours of daily summer light against the dark winters and the golden glow of autumn. Expect the unexpected – it can snow atop kunanyi/Mount Wellington any time of year, and there’s a remarkable clarity to the regular crisp and sparkling winter days – but come knowing what each season promises.

Summer

For mine, Hobart is Australia’s finest summer city (even if the golden local rule remains to take a jacket whenever you go out in the evening). Get more than a handful of days above 30 degrees and it’s considered a hot summer, but temperatures regularly hover in the mid to high 20s, with daylight stretching on until almost 10pm.

The sunny season is truly embraced in this southern climate, filling Hobart’s beaches and packing the days and evenings with top-class events. Berry farms are also bulging with fruit, with offerings of DIY pickings.

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The Sydney Hobart yacht race is a summer highlight.Credit: Rolex

One of Hobart’s biggest weeks falls between Christmas and New Year, when the river and docks fill with finishers in the Sydney Hobart Yacht Race (as well as the Melbourne to Hobart race), all watched over by the week-long Taste of Summer Festival. The two events have a touching crossover in a tradition that has finishing yachts sail past the food festival’s tables on Princes Wharf to loud applause. Two rounds of riverside New Year’s Eve fireworks – one at 9.30pm for families and one at midnight – seal the deal on this wonderful Hobart week.

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Mona’s summer art and music festival, Mona Foma, can be just as weird and wonderful as its more famous winter Dark Mofo, with events ranging from calming morning meditations to high-octane thrash-metal and punk gigs. The festival is spread over separate weekends in Hobart and Launceston.

Hobart is a city of sails, and one of its most beloved events is the Australian Wooden Boat Festival, held biennially (odd-numbered years). The four-day festival is the largest gathering of wooden boats in the southern hemisphere – from tall ships to hand-crafted dinghies – creating magnificent scenes across the River Derwent.

Tasmania’s multitude of gin makers have their moment at Gin-uary, with more than 35 distilleries offering tastings alongside a retinue of food trucks.

kunanyi/Mount Wellington is a popular destination for Hobartians and visitors.

Autumn

The long days are backpedalling fast and locals are bemoaning the perceived brevity of the just-gone summer, but autumn is arguably the most beautiful time in Hobart, with typically settled weather conditions – think calm days and cool nights. It’s a good season to be on the walking trails of kunanyi/Mount Wellington and national parks at Mount Field and Hartz Mountains. The summer tourist surge has eased, and Hobartians are squeezing every trace of vitamin D they can from the lingering warm days.

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There’s an expectation in the air around Hobart because the fagus is on the turn. Australia’s only winter deciduous native plant, Nothofagus gunnii lights up mountain slopes across the state when its small leaves turn yellow, orange and gold. For Hobartians, it heralds an annual migration to Mount Field National Park – usually sometime close to Anzac Day – and hiking in to the Tarn Shelf to witness the colourful change of the season. Closer to town, stroll through parks such as Fitzroy Gardens and St David’s Park to witness the golden season.

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Held in odd-numbered years, Ten Days on the Island is a statewide arts festival, with its hub in Hobart, bringing local arts organisations and international performers to venues ranging from the Theatre Royal to parks and even the Derwent. Raise a glass at the Tasmanian Wine Festival, bringing more than 25 local vineyards to the Botanical Gardens, and perhaps mix your drinks with a stop at the Fresh Hop Beer Festival in New Norfolk, celebrating the hop harvest.

Sporting events include Targa Tasmania, a ‘tarmac rally’ that has rally cars racing around the state’s roads, and the kunanyi Mountain Run if you want to add a 67-kilometre trail run across Hobart’s mountain to your holiday plans.

Winter

Don’t fall for the myth about Hobart as wet and uninviting in winter. This is Australia’s second-driest capital, out-parched only by Adelaide, with an average of just 123 millimetres of rain across the season. Temperatures do plummet – the average maximum temperature in July is a brisk 12 degrees – and there’s often a day or two each winter where snow falls on the city (but very rarely settles). This is the season when you’ll find the Tassie tuxedo – black down jackets – on full display across Hobart.

In giving winters, there’s the chance to slip away to Mount Field National Park to ski the slopes of Mount Mawson – just don’t expect Whistler or Thredbo.

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Dark Mofo has made Hobart a must-visit destination in winter.Credit: Jarrad Seng

Hobart winters were once a thing to shun, but where they used to be grey, they’re now black, and that’s with full intent. Dark Mofo, Hobart’s biggest and wildest winter event (although the festival is “on pause” in 2024), has been transformative in its embrace of the seasonal darkness (the winter sun sets in Hobart around 4.40pm), celebrating all things opaque and shadowy through music, public art, a warming Winter Feast, and the burning of the Ogoh-Ogoh. On the morning of the solstice, everyone strips off and sprints into the river for a swim with a couple of thousand close friends.

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It’s easy to be blinded by the laser lights of Dark Mofo, but there’s plenty else happening in Hobart in winter. Song and sound are the focus at the Festival of Voices, filling the city with concerts, vocal workshops and the warming touch of the Big Sing Bonfire, a fireside singalong drawing hundreds. Just as warming is Tasmanian Whisky Week, featuring distillers from across this island of whisky makers (there are now more than 70 distilleries across Tasmania). Don some pagan garbs and get ready to sing to the trees at the Huon Valley Mid-Winter Festival, chasing evil spirits from the apple orchards with a traditional wassail of song and the clatter of pots and pans.

Spring

Hobart pauses to catch its breath in spring, with few major events on the dance card and locals intent on counting the days to the first 20-plus-degree day. Daylight hours begin to noticeably lengthen, and you only have to skip to the east coast to have a chance to sight humpback and southern right whales making the long annual migration south towards Antarctic waters.

The Japanese garden and bridge at the Royal Botanical Tasmanian Gardens.Credit: Louie Douvis

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Nature’s spring revival is most noticeable in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Australia’s second-oldest botanical gardens, where the centrepiece lily pond is in flower, and the magnolias, daffodils and the Japanese Garden’s cherry blossoms are blooming.

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In a sign of the lengthening days, the Hobart Twilight Market comes out of hibernation at Long Beach, bringing food trucks, music, craft beer and wine to the foreshore lawns. Tasmania’s revered produce is fresh and in season, making a round of the weekend markets – Saturday’s Salamanca Market and Sunday’s Farm Gate Market; or take a ferry across the Derwent to Bellerive for the Saturday morning Tasmanian Produce Market – a seasonal ritual. And given nowhere is far in Tasmania, you might want to build in time to head north to the blooming tulips on Table Cape, usually at their best around the second week of October.