There’ll be more to see and do at Santa’s Village next year.
The nearly 70-year-old Bracebridge theme park recently wrapped some long-running road and infrastructure work, meaning no more disruptions for through traffic in the area.
Bob Montgomery, General Manager of the park, says that included redoing the road and connecting to the municipal water and sewer system, which frees up space to develop the park further.
“For sure there’ll be more attractions. We actually have quite a bit of land that we’ve yet to develop. Several hundred acres, so there’s lots of opportunities there,” says Montgomery. “The campground will grow, we’ll add new cabins, and what we’re looking at in the future is more unique accommodations. Treehouses, geodesic domes, more novelty and more interesting experiences.”
Among those is three brand-new rides—Fly Fishin’, Falcon’s Nest, and Moose on the Loose— which are set to be operational by the 2024 season. He adds that 2025 will bring another major attraction, but one that’s still under wraps. “This is really the biggest expansion we’ve had in our history. We’ve never put this many rides in in a single year.”
According to Montgomery, the expansion comes with a longer season, as well as multiple full-time management positions and over a dozen season ones.
“When we’re spending five or six million dollars, which is about our capital expenditures for 2024, what that means is we’re hiring firms of every kind of description,” says Montgomery. “To come in and excavate, build. Carpenters, electricians, all of those jobs. I think it’s fair to say we’re generating a full-time equivalent of about 100 extra jobs.”
Montgomery says they expect about 30,000 visitors at the site next year, from our region out to the GTA and Ottawa Valley.
“We’re going to be bringing people in from outside of our core community, and that’s good for everybody,” says Montgomery. “They’ll stay in the hotels, they’ll eat at our restaurants, they’ll come visit the park, stay with us in the campground. There’s sort of a multiplier effect of spending that kind of money, both in terms of what it costs to build and to staff it all. But it has an impact across the whole community.”
