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JOURNAL
LOCAL INTELLIGENCE
Laguna Beach has been a working artists' town for more than a century, and each summer that history turns into an event that takes over the place. Three festivals run concurrently on grounds within a few minutes' walk of one another on the inland side of Laguna Canyon Road, just up from the beach.
They are different animals. The Festival of Arts is the juried, long-established one, and it stages the Pageant of the Masters, an outdoor production in which volunteers pose inside full-scale recreations of famous paintings. The Sawdust Art Festival is the scruffier and more hands-on of the three, laid out as a village of plywood booths under eucalyptus with sawdust underfoot and artists working at their stalls. Art-A-Fair is open to artists from outside Laguna, which gives it the widest spread of styles.
The common mistake is treating the festivals as a stop rather than a day. The grounds are large, the walk between them takes minutes but the browsing does not, and the Pageant runs in the evening in an outdoor amphitheater. Each festival keeps its own season and its own hours, so confirm the current dates with the organisers before you plan around them.
Laguna is a chain of coves under steep hillsides with narrow streets, and it is hard to park in on an ordinary July Saturday. Festival weeks make it worse. The town runs a free summer trolley for exactly this reason, with routes along Pacific Coast Highway and up the canyon past the festival grounds, plus park-and-ride lots on the edge of town.
Use it. Drive in once, leave the car where you are staying or at a canyon lot, and ride. The alternative is circling metered blocks and small lots that filled before mid-morning. If you are coming down from Newport or Huntington for an evening performance, allow far more time on Pacific Coast Highway than the mileage suggests, because summer traffic through the coves crawls.
Two other things earn their space. The grounds are outdoors and the canyon cools fast once the sun drops behind the hillside, so bring a layer even in August. And if you want to stay in Laguna itself during festival season, book months out: legal short-term rental supply along this coast is capped by city permit rules, and these are the tightest weeks of the year. Your local manager can usually tell you which nights are already gone.