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December-long ‘light park’ event opens in Cloverdale as first in Canada for Surrey company

‘We’ve wanted to do this for quite a long time, so it’s really nice that it’s coming together here’
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A view of the Agriplex building during the Lumagica Surrey event, which continues until Dec. 30. (Photo: Tom Zillich)

Areas of Cloverdale Fairgrounds are lit up for a Lumagica Surrey event this month.

The “outdoor/indoor global Holiday experience” lights up the pathway of Bill Reid Millennium Amphitheatre, at 64th Avenue and 176th Street, and also the Agriplex building, which serves as a “North Pole” full of food and entertainment. There are photos with Santa, by donation to Cloverdale Community Kitchen.

The “light park” opened Friday (Dec. 3) as the first event of its kind in Canada for MK Illumination, which has worked on Surrey’s Bear Creek Park Lights and other “True Light Experiences” in the region. The global company has a Canada West branch located on the Surrey/Langley border.

“This is the first kind of light park we’ve done here in Surrey,” said company rep Anne-Marie Davidson. “MK has done quite a few such events in Europe, and there’s one done in the U.S. this year, and this is the first one in Canada, this year, as a Lumagica event. We’ve wanted to do this for quite a long time, so it’s really nice that it’s coming together here.”

The one-kilometre light walk is open until Dec. 30, nightly from 4 to 10 p.m., excluding Christmas Day. An adult ticket is $25, or $74 for a weekend family pass for two adults and two kids. A “required” parking pass is priced at $5. More details are posted to lumagica.ca.

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Health-related protocols for Lumagica Surrey include ticket time slots to limit crowd capacity and reduce queues, vaccine code check at the entrance as per B.C. health guidelines, a one-way trail route, extra staff to guide flow through the park, additional cleaning across the route every night, hand sanitizer stations, physical distance signage in place and mandatory masks indoors.

• RELATED STORY, from October: ‘Festive light extravaganza’ coming to Surrey in December, with COVID vax pass mandatory.

“The infrastructure of the site here is really good, and we thought this would be a really good site to have, both indoor and outdoor, with lots of parking,” Davidson explained.

“It’s nice that it’s dry today,” she added on opening day, “because it’s been so wet while setting up here. All the people who set this up did such an amazing job while getting absolutely soaked. We have an amazing team here, we’re lucky.”

Back in 2018, another company used the park’s grassy area as the site of the ill-fated Art of Lights lantern festival, which opened two months late, in mid-December, due to permit issues and poor weather.

Lumagica Surrey is contained on the pathway, “on the outskirts,” Davidson noted. “We’ve stayed clear of the grass area, which gets really wet and marshy in the winter.”



tom.zillich@surreynowleader.com

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Tom Zillich

About the Author: Tom Zillich

I cover entertainment, sports and news stories for the Surrey Now-Leader, where I've worked for more than half of my 30-plus years in the newspaper business.
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