Uncover Secrets on Small-group Ballarat Walking Tours
Explore hidden laneways, gold rush stories, local food, with exclusive access to grand buildings, and learn about the colourful characters who shaped Ballarat.
CHOOSE YOUR BALLARAT Tour
Explore Ballarat’s goldrush past on the Ballarat City Tales tour or delve into special interests like the Ballarat Food & Gin tour, Ballarat Vintage Tour or book a custom tour.
Our signature tour
Private Walking Tours - CUSTOM
Ballarat Tours for Curious Travellers
Ballarat is full of fascinating stories. Hidden Lanes designs small-group Ballarat walking tours and hosted local experiences so both local and travellers can see this town in an entirely new light. We bring the city to life through local storytelling, colourful characters, beautiful heritage places and the surprising details most visitors miss.
created by local
storytellers, artists
& guides
Hidden Lanes is made by people who live in Ballarat, love its strange corners, and spend far too much time thinking about old buildings, forgotten characters, and beautiful shopfronts.
Our guided walking tours bring together local history, original artwork, careful research, and a touch of theatre, helping visitors experience Ballarat as a living city.
Ballarat is full of hidden stories and extraordinary places hiding in plain sight.
Join Hidden Lanes to step inside historic buildings, uncover forgotten tales, explore hidden spaces and experience parts of the city that most visitors never explore.
From grand hotels and hidden rooms to colourful characters and gold rush secrets, every tour is designed to reveal a side of Ballarat few people ever get to see.
Our experiences are designed to be intimate, small group and authentic.
Before creating Hidden Lanes, Jarrod and Emma Hall spent nine years in South Korea. One summer, they walked, cycled, filmed and mapped their way around Jeju Island.
Their Jeju project followed quiet coastal roads, forest paths, villages, cafes and volcanic landscapes, and became both a slow travel guide and a film featured at the Korean Expat Film Festival in Seoul and the World Bicycle Film Festival in Poland.
That journey shaped the way we create our Ballarat walking tours today: slow enough to notice the details, curious enough to follow the side streets, and personal enough to feel like you’ve been welcomed into the place.
Slow Travel Inspired by
Korea’s Jeju Island
Our Ballarat tours were developed on the Country of the Wadawurrung who have performed age old cultural ceremonies, celebrations and traditions here for thousands of years. We would like to pay our respects to the Elders past and present.
All recommendations and travel information is accurate to our knowledge but the information given should be fact-checked and never be considered official safety, travel or legal advice.