3 of the best Melbourne walking tours | Tour recommendations

The best Melbourne walking tours include exploring the laneways and arcades, focusing on the street art scene and an Aboriginal take on the Royal Botanic Gardens.

There are several walking tours available in Melbourne. But as with every major city, some of these are somewhat mediocre. So don’t waste your time on them, and focus on the best Melbourne walking tours – ones which give genuinely strong insight into the city you’re exploring.

Australia Travel Questions’ David Whitley has done all three of the following, and strongly recommends them.

Best walking tours in Melbourne: Lanes and arcades tour

Once full of bins and seediness, Melbourne’s laneways now brim with semi-disguised bars, hot restaurants and world class street art. The three hour lanes and arcades tour from Hidden Secrets is a fine way of digging out the top finds – and also heads inside fab art deco buildings you’d otherwise saunter straight past.

The mental notes stack up. That’s the secret door to the cocktail bar, that’s the hip tapas joint, that’s the local designer’s boutique. Much of Melbourne’s personality springs from its tiny laneways, but many look empty and uninspired until you take a closer look. The Lanes and Arcades tour with Hidden Secrets Tours succinctly plucks out the ones worth exploring.

The $129 tour price includes coffee and chocolate tasting. Find out more here.

Best Melbourne walking tours: Melbourne Street Art Tours

Melbourne has a strong claim to being the Southern Hemisphere’s street art capital. The laneways have been brightened up considerably by Melbourne’s squadrons of street artists.

And some of them are guides for Melbourne Street Art Tours, which runs three hour walks through some of the more interesting laneways. They know which artist did what, but also have a good eye for spotting works that would otherwise be missed high up on walls or peering behind pipes. Scrap metal figures and situation-specific alterations of signs are amongst the things the novice might miss.

The tours finish with cheese and nibbles back at the artists’ workshop/ gallery space, and cost $80 including GST. Book here.

Top Melbourne walking tours: Aboriginal Botanic Gardens walk

“Melbourne has 50,000 native plants. Every single one of them had a use,” explains the guide on the Aboriginal heritage walk through the Royal Botanic Gardens.

The iced tea’s made with lemon wattle leaves, the map marked with Australia’s native language boundaries is pulled out and the Indigenous 101 lessons continue. Melaleuca bark’s good for painting on, bracken resin clears up ant bites, mat rushes make great eel traps.

The walk gives a thoroughly different perspective on the gardens, and reminds of how Indigenous Australian culture is entwined with the land and nature.

The tours cost $40, and bookings can be made online.

All prices are correct at the time of writing, but subject to change in future.

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