Ask five people in Haliburton County what "the studio tour" means and you'll get five different answers, because there are two of them. Both happen every October. Both send visitors down back roads to knock on the doors of working artists. And most people, including plenty of longtime residents, have only ever done one.
That gap matters more this year than it has in a while. The main event, officially called The Studio Tour Haliburton Highlands, is running its 2026 edition on the first two weekends of October: October 3 and 4, then October 10 and 11, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. But if that's the only tour on your calendar, you're planning around half the county's working art community.
One Name, Two Different Maps
The Studio Tour Haliburton Highlands is the one most people mean when they say "the studio tour." It's the older, better-known event, and its self-guided route runs from Tory Hill in the east to Carnarvon in the west, threading through Minden, Haliburton village, and Eagle Lake along the way.
The other tour is the Highlands East Studio Tour, now in its third decade, covering a different stretch of the county: Highland Grove, Harcourt, Wilberforce, Tory Hill, Gooderham, and Irondale, roughly the ground between Bancroft and Haliburton. Notice that Tory Hill shows up on both maps. It's the one point where the two routes genuinely overlap, which is exactly the kind of detail that trips people up if they assume one brochure covers everything east of Minden.
These aren't rival versions of the same idea. They're two separate juried tours, run by two separate groups of artists, on two separate schedules. If you've only ever done one, you haven't seen a partial version of Haliburton's studio tour season. You've seen one full tour and missed an entirely different one.
The Numbers Behind the Growth
The main tour has gotten noticeably bigger. In 2024, its own promotional materials listed 29 returning and new artists across the two October weekends. The Haliburton County Arts Council's listing for 2026 puts that number at 43.
That's not a rounding difference. It's close to fifty percent more working studios opening their doors than just two years ago, on the same two-weekend window, along roughly the same route. For a self-guided tour where you're already deciding how many stops you can realistically fit into a Saturday, that growth changes the math. A route that used to be doable in a long day now genuinely benefits from spreading across both weekends, which is presumably part of why the tour still runs on that two-weekend structure instead of compressing into one.
What's Actually Worth Planning Around
The specifics are what make this tour worth the drive rather than just a nice idea. In Tory Hill, one of the tour's most talked-about stops is a working glassblowing studio set up inside the old United Church in what's now a near-ghost town, the kind of setting that photographs well but is genuinely built for production, not just atmosphere. Elsewhere on the route, potters have wood-fired kilns running, weavers have looms set up so you can watch cloth built one thread at a time, and at least one studio keeps farm animals alongside its felting work, so the stop doubles as a visit to a small working farm.
Boshkung Brewing Company, which has locations in both Minden and Carnarvon, right along the tour's western stretch, has in past years released a limited Studio Tour beer timed to the event. Haliburton Highlands Brewing, closer to the eastern side of the route, is worth building into the same day if you're treating this as a full outing rather than a quick errand.
There's also a companion exhibition worth knowing about if you're in Haliburton village during either weekend. The Haliburton Highlands Artist Exhibition runs at The Space in Haliburton from September 19 through October 19, which means it overlaps both studio tour weekends and gives you a single indoor stop to see a curated cross-section of the same artistic community before or after you're out on the country roads.
Planning the Actual Route
The tour publishes a printed brochure with a map and driving directions, but if you'd rather navigate digitally, the Toureka! app gives you an interactive map with turn by turn directions built specifically for the tour's stops. Given that this year's route covers 43 studios spread across a wide stretch of the county, from Tory Hill to Carnarvon, having a real navigation tool instead of a folded paper map is a meaningful upgrade over how most people did this a decade ago.
If you're trying to decide which weekend to go, it's worth checking the brochure or the tour's site directly, since a two-weekend structure like this one sometimes means different studios or hours across the two dates. Either way, the earlier weekend tends to line up with peak fall color, while the second often runs a little quieter once the first wave of visitors has come through.
The Part Most Visitors Never Sort Out
Here's the practical takeaway. If someone tells you they "did the studio tour" in Haliburton County, ask which one. If they mention Tory Hill, that's not enough to tell you either, since it's the one town both tours pass through. The real tell is whether they also mention Carnarvon and Minden, which puts them on the main Studio Tour Haliburton Highlands route, or whether they mention Harcourt, Wilberforce, Gooderham, or Irondale, which puts them on the Highlands East route instead.
For residents who've lived here through a few Octobers, this isn't trivia. It's the difference between telling a visiting friend "go see the studio tour" and actually being able to tell them which one fits the day they have. The county's arts community has quietly built two distinct, decades-old traditions running in parallel, and treating them as interchangeable means missing half of what's actually on offer.
Haliburton's fall calendar tends to get flattened into a single seasonal event in most write-ups. It isn't one. It's two juried tours, dozens of working studios, a brewery collaboration, and a village gallery show that all happen to land in the same four-week window. Knowing the difference is the kind of local knowledge that doesn't show up in a quick search, but it's exactly what makes a Saturday here worth planning rather than winging.
Ryan Harkin and the team at Birchwood Real Estate spend as much time tracking what makes a Haliburton weekend worth having as we do tracking the market itself. If you're weighing a move to this part of cottage country and want the kind of ground-level read that only comes from actually living here, we're glad to talk.
