Things to do in Boca Raton
What is actually on, where it actually is, and the one thing that decides half of it: the town is two towns, and they are twenty minutes apart.
Most "things to do in Boca Raton" lists are a ranking of restaurants by somebody who has not been. This is not that. It is where the things are, when they are open to you, and what it costs to park.
The town is two towns
East of I-95 is the City of Boca Raton: the beach parks, Mizner Park, the downtown library, Old Town Hall. West of the Turnpike is unincorporated Palm Beach County — everyone calls it West Boca, the post office calls it Boca Raton, and the city does not.
It matters more than it sounds. Of the 554 businesses published on this site, 236 are outside the city limits. A beach parking permit depends on which side you live on. So does who answers when you call about a pothole. If you are not sure which you are in, that has its own guide.
For a visitor the practical version is simpler: almost everything on a list like this is east, and the drive across town is twenty minutes on a good day.
The four places that carry most of it
Mizner Park. A single block downtown holding the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the amphitheater, the Studio, and the restaurants around the plaza. It is the one part of Boca you can do on foot, and the parking is free in the garages — which is not true of anywhere else on this page.
The beach parks. Three of them, all on A1A, all charging for a car. Spanish River Park is the big one and holds the dog beach. The beaches have their own guide, because the parking rules there catch people out.
Gumbo Limbo Nature Center. On the beach side, free to enter, and the single most-programd venue in this town — guided treks, sea turtle talks, night hikes, kayaking. It runs more listed events than anywhere else in Boca.
Sugar Sand Park. Out on Military Trail, roughly the midpoint between the two Bocas, and the reason most West Boca families drive east at all. It holds the Children's Science Explorium and the Willow Theatre, and it is where nearly every children's program in this town happens.
What is on this week
This site keeps a calendar of 161 events across 505 dates, taken from the city's and the CRA's own published feeds, with nothing invented and nothing padded.
- What's on this weekend
- Today and tomorrow
- Kids and family events
Two honest warnings about that calendar. A large share of it is city board meetings, which are genuinely open to the public and genuinely not a day out. And the evening restaurant-and-music side of Boca is badly under-represented, because those organizers do not publish a calendar feed anybody can read — if you run one, send it to us.
The thing nobody tells you
The parking is the plan. Mizner Park is free, the beach parks are not, and a beach permit does not work at a downtown meter. If you are doing both in one day, read the parking guide first — it is a ten-minute read that saves an afternoon of hunting.
Where this comes from
Checked against these on 2026-09-15. Fees, deadlines and portals change — if one of these pages disagrees with this one, the official page is right and we would like to know.
September 2026 — First published.
We record when a guide was published and when it was last revised. We do not yet record what changed, so this is a dating record rather than a changelog.
Written and checked by a person, and carrying the month they were published and the month they were last revised. Where a rule or a fee applies we link the official source rather than quoting a number that will go stale.
A fee that has changed, a link that has moved, an answer that is no longer right — tell us and we will check it and say we did.
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