Best Things to Do in Hobart: Tasmania’s Cool, Creative Capital
Hobart is one of the best surprises in Australian travel. Tucked into the folds of southern Tasmania, beside the broad, cold waters of the Derwent Estuary and in the shadow of the brooding dolerite bulk of Mount Wellington (now officially renamed kunanyi), it’s a city that rewards slow exploration. It’s small — just 240,000 people — but it punches far, far above its weight when it comes to food, art, history, and natural setting. Once you go, you understand why Hobart has quietly accumulated a devoted following.
The city has changed significantly over the past decade, driven in large part by MONA — the Museum of Old and New Art, which opened in 2011 and essentially put Hobart on the global cultural map overnight. But MONA is only part of the story. The colonial sandstone buildings, the extraordinary fresh food scene, the weekend Salamanca Market, and the sheer drama of the surrounding landscape all contribute to making Hobart one of the most complete travel experiences in Australia.
📋 TL;DR – Best Things to Do in Hobart
- ✅ MONA is extraordinary: One of the world’s great private art museums — provocative, funny, disturbing, and unmissable. Allow a full day.
- 🛒 Salamanca Market is the best in Australia: Saturday mornings on Salamanca Place — 300+ stalls of fresh produce, crafts, and street food in a stunning historic setting.
- 🏔️ Mount Wellington/kunanyi is unmissable: A 20-minute drive from the CBD takes you to the summit at 1,271 metres — the views on a clear day are unforgettable.
- 🦞 The seafood is the best in Australia: Atlantic salmon, abalone, Pacific oysters, and crayfish — all extraordinary and available fresh throughout the city.
- ⛵ The Sydney to Hobart yacht race finish is magical: If you’re in Hobart in late December/early January, watching the race finishers arrive is a genuine spectacle.
- 🏛️ The colonial history is fascinating: Hobart is one of Australia’s oldest cities — the sandstone warehouses, Battery Point village, and Port Arthur convict site all tell a remarkable story.
🎨 MONA: a museum unlike anything else on earth
MONA — the Museum of Old and New Art — is not like other museums. Founded by professional gambler and mathematician David Walsh using his casino winnings, it occupies an extraordinary subterranean space carved into a sandstone peninsula on the Derwent River, about 12km north of Hobart. The collection is deliberately provocative: Walsh has said he wants MONA to challenge visitors, to confront them with uncomfortable ideas about sex, death, and religion. It succeeds. Magnificently.
Highlights of the permanent collection include Cloaca Professional — a machine that replicates the human digestive system in grim, odiferous detail; Julius Popp’s bit.fall, a waterfall that spells out words from the news feed in falling droplets; and a series of large-scale works that blur the line between art and architecture. The ancient collection — Roman mosaics, Egyptian antiquities, medieval manuscripts — sits alongside contemporary provocations in a way that forces you to reconsider what art is and what it’s for. It’s brilliant, even when (especially when) it makes you deeply uncomfortable.
The best way to arrive is by ferry: MONA operates its own ferry service (MR-1 and MR-2, brilliantly designed vessels) from Brooke Street Pier in the city, a 25-minute trip along the Derwent that arrives directly at the museum’s waterfront landing. Buy tickets in advance — the museum and the ferry both fill up, particularly on weekends and during the MONA FOMA and Dark Mofo festivals. The winery and restaurant on site are both excellent, and the museum shop is one of the best in Australia.
👉 Book Hobart City Tours & Experiences on GetYourGuide →
🛒 Salamanca Market and Salamanca Place
Salamanca Market is held every Saturday from 8:30am to 3pm on Salamanca Place — a long, wide, heritage-listed street lined with stunning Georgian sandstone warehouses that were originally built to service Hobart’s 19th-century port. The market is one of the great Australian weekly rituals: over 300 stalls selling fresh Tasmanian produce (the cheeses, the cherries in summer, the salmon, the truffles in winter), handmade crafts, antiques, books, art, and street food. It’s genuinely extraordinary in quality and atmosphere, and it’s been running every Saturday since 1972.
Go early (before 9:30am) to beat the crowds and get first pick of the fresh produce. Eat breakfast at one of the food stalls — the Smolt café on the corner is a good option, or grab a pastry from one of the bakers and eat it on one of the outdoor benches. Budget at least two to three hours to do the market justice, and bring a bag because you will buy things you didn’t plan on buying.
After the market, explore Salamanca Place itself and the surrounding Battery Point neighbourhood — a beautifully preserved Victorian-era village of cottages, pubs, and churches that has barely changed in 150 years. The winding lanes around Arthur’s Circus are particularly atmospheric. The Salamanca Arts Centre, housed in a complex of converted sandstone warehouses, has galleries, studios, cafés, and performance spaces that are worth exploring any day of the week.
🏔️ Mount Wellington / kunanyi
Rising to 1,271 metres directly behind Hobart, kunanyi/Mount Wellington is an ever-present presence in the city’s life — visible from almost everywhere, and wearing its cap of snow from late autumn through to spring. The summit is just a 20-minute drive from the CBD via a sealed road (Pinnacle Road), and on a clear day the views are extraordinary: the Derwent Estuary and Hobart spread below you, the Tasman Peninsula to the east, the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and Bruny Island to the south, and the wild Tasmanian interior behind.
You might also enjoy reading about Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race Start.
The summit can be bitterly cold and windy even on warm days in the city below — take extra layers regardless of what the weather looks like when you leave your hotel. The mountain has an extensive network of hiking trails for those who want to earn their views: the Pipeline Track from the South Hobart suburb of Fern Tree to the summit is a classic half-day walk, while the Organ Pipes Track takes you up through dramatic dolerite cliff formations. Mountain biking is popular on the trails below the summit, with several good downhill runs.
🦞 Food and the Hobart food scene
Hobart has arguably the best food scene of any Australian city relative to its size. The combination of extraordinary local produce — Tasmanian Atlantic salmon, Pacific oysters, abalone, crayfish, premium beef, world-class vegetables, truffles, cherries, and stone fruit — and a restaurant culture that knows how to treat these ingredients with respect has produced a dining scene that punches genuinely at the national level.
🦪 Oysters at the waterfront
Tasmanian oysters are the best in Australia — clean, briny, and with a depth of flavour that reflects the cold, pristine waters they’re grown in. The most atmospheric place to eat them is at the Fish Frenzy restaurant on the Brooke Street waterfront, where you can sit outside watching the harbour traffic and work through a dozen oysters before moving on to a plate of local crayfish. Mures Fish House, also on the waterfront, is another institution — bigger, glossier, and with a slightly more upmarket feel, but equally committed to showcasing Tasmanian seafood at its best.
🍷 The restaurant scene
Franklin is the most celebrated restaurant in Hobart — a wood-fired cooking temple in a converted wool store where the focus is entirely on exceptional Tasmanian produce, cooked over fire and served with extraordinary Tasmanian wines. Book well in advance; tables are hard to come by. For something more casual, The Glass House at MONA has excellent food with river views; Templo in the CBD is a tiny, intimate restaurant doing sophisticated Italian-inflected cooking; and Smolt in Salamanca is one of those reliable, good-value options that you find yourself returning to again and again.
For more inspiration, check out What to Do in Hobart.
The Roaring 40s bar, the Winston craft beer bar, and the Willing Bros cocktail bar give Hobart a genuinely good after-dinner scene that defies the city’s sleepy reputation. Don’t leave without trying a glass of Tasmanian whisky — the island is producing some of the world’s finest single malts, and Lark Distillery and Sullivans Cove have established international reputations that make them easy to find in good bars everywhere.
👉 Book Hobart Food Tours & Tastings on GetYourGuide →
⛵ The waterfront and Sullivans Cove
Hobart’s waterfront is one of the most beautiful urban waterfronts in Australia — a working harbour where fishing vessels, luxury yachts, and the MONA ferry jostle for space against a backdrop of Georgian sandstone warehouses and colourful fishing boats. Sullivans Cove is the historic heart of the port, and it’s where European settlement of Tasmania effectively began in 1804. A walk along the wharf from Constitution Dock to Salamanca Place takes you past seafood restaurants, galleries, the Maritime Museum, and a succession of boats that range from working fishing vessels to multimillion-dollar yachts.
Constitution Dock is famous as the finish line of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, held each year over the period from Boxing Day to early January. If you’re in Hobart when the race finishers arrive — the fastest boats arrive in two to three days; the slower ones trickle in over a week — the atmosphere is extraordinary. Thousands of people line the dock cheering exhausted, elated sailors across the finish line, and the nearby pubs and restaurants extend their hours to accommodate the celebrations.
🏛️ Colonial history and heritage
Hobart is the second-oldest city in Australia (after Sydney) and its colonial history is more legible than almost anywhere else in the country. The sandstone Georgian and Victorian architecture of Salamanca Place, Battery Point, and the central city is extraordinarily well-preserved — largely because Hobart didn’t go through the frenzied development boom that reshaped most Australian cities in the 1960s and 70s.
🔓 Port Arthur Historic Site
A day trip (or overnight stay) to Port Arthur, 90 minutes south of Hobart on the Tasman Peninsula, is one of the most significant historical experiences in Australia. The Port Arthur Historic Site was Australia’s largest convict settlement — a place of systematic labour, punishment, and experimentation with new theories of penal reform in the 19th century. The ruins of the penitentiary, church, hospital, and model prison are set in beautiful, incongruously green grounds beside a harbour, and the combination of natural beauty and human suffering creates an atmosphere that’s uniquely unsettling. Excellent guided tours and nightly ghost tours add layers of context and story to what you see.
🎭 Dark Mofo and Hobart’s festival calendar
MONA’s influence on Hobart’s cultural calendar has been transformative. Dark Mofo — MONA’s winter festival, held each June around the winter solstice — has become one of Australia’s most extraordinary arts events: a deliberately transgressive celebration of darkness, winter, and the edges of human experience that fills the city with art installations, music, fire, and performance. The Nude Solstice Swim (yes, exactly what it sounds like, in the Derwent at dawn on the winter solstice) has become one of its most famous events. MONA FOMA (Festival of Music and Art), held in summer, is a more cheerful counterpart — cutting-edge music, art, and ideas delivered with wit and generosity.
💡 Practical tips for visiting Hobart
- 🌡️ Pack for cold weather: Even in summer, Hobart mornings can be cool and the mountain is cold year-round. Layers are always the right call.
- 📅 Saturday is the best day to arrive: You get the Salamanca Market first thing, and the city is at its most buzzing.
- 🚗 A hire car expands your options enormously: Day trips to Bruny Island, Port Arthur, the Huon Valley, and the Tasman Peninsula are all superb and all benefit from having your own transport.
- 🎫 Book MONA tickets in advance: The museum sells out, especially on weekends and during festivals. The MONA FOMA and Dark Mofo events can sell out months ahead.
- ⛵ Take the MONA ferry: Even if you have a car, take the ferry to MONA at least one way — it’s a beautiful 25-minute river journey on a beautifully designed vessel.
Hobart is the kind of place you visit intending to spend two days and stay for five. It has a warmth and intimacy that bigger cities rarely achieve — you feel like you’re discovering something real and personal, not a destination designed to receive tourists. That’s rare, and it’s worth cherishing.
Exploring more of Tasmania, read our guides to best restaurants in Hobart, best day trips from Hobart, the best beaches in Tasmania, how many days in Tasmania, things to do in Tasmania, luxury lodges Tasmania, and things to do in Tasmania.
