Sunset Boulevard Turns Into Santa Clara Drive. For Three Days in September, That Matters.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Ask a longtime resident where Sunset Boulevard ends and Santa Clara Drive begins, and most will shrug. It isn't a hard line. Head west past Harmons and the shopping centers that have filled in over the last couple of years, and somewhere around Canyon View Drive, the road just starts going by a different name. Dutchman's Market gives out the exact spot in its own directions to customers: keep heading west on Sunset until it turns into Santa Clara Drive, then look for the Sinclair station on the corner.
Most of the year, that name change is trivia. For three days this September, it's the reason half the town changes its plans.
Santa Clara's Swiss Days runs September 24 through 26 this year, the 36th time the city has put on the festival since it started in 1990. The city's own event page lays out the shape of it: a community dinner and opening ceremony, a Friday night concert, a 5K, a pancake breakfast, and the weekend's centerpiece, a parade that travels along Santa Clara Drive from the Jacob Hamblin Home to City Hall. Heritage Square hosts pioneer-era activities. Canyon View Park hosts the Red Rock Car Show. The Santa Clara History Museum opens its doors with volunteers who can help you trace a family tree back to one of the town's founding Swiss households.
Last year's 35th-anniversary event drew about 10,000 visitors, according to a St. George News feature on the festival, and it's grown a set of running traditions that make it feel more like a family reunion than a tourist stop. There are wooden cows that line the parade route and get photographed more than most of the floats. There's a mooing contest and a yodeling contest. There's a jigsaw puzzle of the town, designed by Utah folk artist Eric Dowdle and unveiled at Swiss Days in 2023, that's sold at the festival every year since. Swiss Days committee member Lainee Frei, whose family runs Dutchman's Market, put it simply to St. George News: the festival is a way for people to get to know what Santa Clara is all about.
All of that happens on the stretch of Santa Clara Drive that runs through the historic townsite. And that's the stretch that closes.
The city has posted road closure guidance for Swiss Days in past years, and the pattern has been consistent: Santa Clara Drive through the historic district is off limits to regular traffic for the parade, and there's no parking at the event site itself. The 5K has followed the same model each year, with runners shuttled in rather than driving to the start:
If you live anywhere near the historic core, this is the weekend you build your errands around, not through. But here's the part that a lot of even longtime residents haven't connected: the road that closes and the road that carries your everyday grocery run, your gas fill-up, and your dinner options are the same physical corridor. They just go by different names depending on which end you're standing on.
While Santa Clara Drive through the historic district turns into a parade route for one weekend, the Sunset Boulevard end of the same corridor keeps running exactly as it does every other week of the year, and that end has changed more in the last eighteen months than almost any other stretch of road in the city.
CP Plaza, the retail center on Sunset Boulevard, has been the anchor of that change. China Palace has operated there since the fall of 2024. A local business roundup from last year also tracked DoughnutsVille, Jade's Cafe, and a pizza and gelato shop moving into the same plaza, along with a fourth location of Rosy Nails Spa and Sanctuary Holistic Wellness next door. Nomad Soul Interiors, a Utah-owned furniture and decor shop, was set to join the lineup around the same time. A traffic light went in at 1300 West to handle the added flow.
Further along, near Harmons, Meráki Greek Grill opened its first Utah location, brought in by the same Las Vegas-based team behind the concept elsewhere. Recent customer reviews describe it as one of the newer additions locals have been excited to try, tucked right next to the grocery store most people already stop at weekly.
And at the far western edge of that same corridor, right where Sunset Boulevard becomes Santa Clara Drive, Dutchman's Market has been serving its original pink sugar cookie since 1986. Four decades in, the Frei family that runs it is building a warehouse near the Canyon View Drive corner to keep up with cookie demand that's outgrown the gas station bakery where it started. It's the same family with a hand in the festival's committee work, which is a small but real detail: the people running Swiss Days and the people running the town's oldest bakery are, in this case, the same people.
None of this is complicated once you see the shape of it. The historic end of the road performs the town's identity for three days a year. The Sunset Boulevard end feeds it every other day, and it's the end that's actually absorbed most of the new restaurant and retail growth over the last year and a half.
That has a practical use during Swiss Days weekend. If you're trying to grab dinner on the Friday night of the festival and don't want to deal with parade-route parking or the road closures around the historic district, the newer stretch of Sunset Boulevard, from CP Plaza through the Harmons area, is running business as usual. If you're headed to the 5K or the parade itself, plan around the shuttle lot at Snow Canyon High School rather than trying to find parking near the event site, because there won't be any.
It also says something about how the town is actually growing. Santa Clara's identity gets built once a year around a handful of blocks near the Jacob Hamblin Home. Its daily life, the version residents actually live in, has been quietly filling in a mile east on the same road under a different name. Knowing both ends of that corridor, not just the postcard version, is the difference between navigating the festival weekend like a regular and getting stuck wondering why a road you drive every day suddenly isn't there.
If you're curious what else defines day-to-day life in this part of Washington County, our Santa Clara neighborhood guide covers more of what makes the area distinct beyond the festival calendar. And if Southern Utah's mix of small-town tradition and steady growth has you thinking about your own next move here, whether that's now or down the road, Holly Gardner would be glad to talk through what that could look like. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
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