A July Weekend In Alamo: Livorna Park Fridays, The Sunday Market, And A New Name On Danville Boulevard
July 23, 2026
July 23, 2026
Alamo does not run a downtown festival calendar the way Danville and Walnut Creek do. There is no Art & Wine weekend, no closed-street summer series, no ticketed lineup that shows up in regional press. What Alamo has instead is three weekly anchors that sit in the same two square miles and repeat, without fanfare, from July through Labor Day. Most residents use one of them regularly. Very few string all three together in a single weekend, which is a small oversight worth correcting this summer.
The anchors are Friday-evening concerts at Livorna Park, the Sunday farmers' market in the Alamo Plaza parking lot, and the Iron Horse Trail spine that connects both back to the middle of town. The one variable this year is what happens on Danville Boulevard between them, where a familiar restaurant address is operating under new ownership for the first time in seventeen years.
The Alamo Municipal Advisory Council programs a four-week concert series each July at Livorna Park, at Livorna Road and Miranda Avenue. Concerts run Friday evenings from 6:30 to 8:30 pm with free admission and food trucks on site, and the format is the same each week: chairs and blankets on the grass, picnic dinners, tribute acts covering material the crowd knows.
The 2026 lineup, as booked by the Alamo MAC:
The series is presented by the Alamo Municipal Advisory Council and admission is free. If you are new to it, the practical notes matter more than the lineup: bring your own chairs, arrive by 6:15 for a spot with a sight line, and treat the food trucks as dinner rather than a snack. Parking around Livorna Road fills quickly after 6:00, and the walk-in traffic from the Stone Valley neighborhoods is heavier than the small parking area suggests.
The single biggest change to a summer weekend in Alamo this year has nothing to do with the parks. It has to do with the cafe at 3195 Danville Blvd., which residents have been calling Peasant's Courtyard since 2009. That is over.
The last day in business for the Peasant's Courtyard was April 19, 2026, and the space was rebranded under new ownership as The Courtyard Restaurant starting the next day. The transition was unusually clean. The new restaurant opened immediately after Peasant's Courtyard's final service, and while some have described it as a rebrand or a simple change of ownership, the Courtyard Restaurant has entirely new owners, a new chef, and a new menu on the way.
The new operator is a name locals already know from the Danville farmers' market. The family behind East Bay Artisan, the bakery known for selling at farmers' markets in the area including Danville every Saturday, is making its first brick-and-mortar move into the San Ramon Valley with the Courtyard rebrand. The restaurant is tied to the same East Bay Artisan operation that runs Cafe 1277 in Walnut Creek.
For the weekend calculus, that matters in two ways. The address is still the default patio breakfast or long-lunch stop between the trail and the market, and it is still the closest sit-down option to the concert series on Friday evenings. What is different is that the menu is not the one you remember. Give it a first visit before assuming it plays the same role in your Saturday routine that Peasant's Courtyard did.
For context on the outgoing operator: The Worth Group also runs The Peasant & The Pear in downtown Danville and The Bourbon Pear in downtown Livermore, and its downtown Walnut Creek venture, The Little Pear, closed this January after less than three years.
The farmers' market has been in the same place, at the same time, so consistently that most residents forget how unusual that is in Contra Costa. Per the California Department of Food and Agriculture's July 1, 2026 certified-markets listing, the Alamo CFM operates Sundays 9 am to 2 pm year-round at 120 Alamo Plaza in the Bank of America parking lot. Year-round is the operative phrase. Brentwood's market runs Saturdays year-round as well, but Concord's Thursday market is a summer-only affair, which is why Alamo Plaza absorbs a steady stream of shoppers from outside the 94507.
The scale is deliberately small. Regulars describe it as an excellent smaller market where everything is top quality, with vendors selling fresh strawberries and cherries, roasted garlic hummus with pita, Polish ribs and mushroom soup, and French pastries that give the market a European flair. Recent Sunday rosters have included Achadinha Cheese Co. and 3 Roses & Thorn Candle Co., among a rotating group.
If your weekend already includes the Friday concert, the Sunday market closes the loop: same parking-lot footprint scale, same neighbors, same window of the year. You can walk from the market up Danville Boulevard to breakfast at 3195 in under ten minutes.
The trail is the piece that ties the other two anchors together, and it is worth understanding as a corridor rather than a workout. The developed Iron Horse Trail begins in Concord near Highway 4, runs south through Walnut Creek, crosses eastward under I-680 at Rudgear Road near a Park & Ride, and passes through a rural-residential stretch into downtown Alamo and the Alamo Square shopping center. Alamo sits roughly in the middle of a 32-mile paved run, which is why the trail feels less like a destination and more like a sidewalk that happens to reach every town you might want to visit.
Two segments matter for a summer weekend:
The stop most people miss on the Alamo side is a mile off the trail. Hap Magee Ranch Park is a historic 16.3-acre park bordered by San Ramon Creek, with a hiking trail that links to Las Trampas, Iron Horse, and Mount Diablo Regional Trails. It sits about a mile off the Iron Horse Trail toward Alamo and includes the Canine Corral, an off-leash dog park. On a Saturday morning it functions as the informal dog-walking headquarters for the west side of town.
The East Bay Regional Park District maintains the corridor. According to the park website, the segment is accessible for visitors using wheelchairs, mobility equipment, or strollers, with one designated van-accessible parking space in the paved lot and a paved-asphalt or smooth-concrete surface at least nine feet wide. Useful if you are bringing a stroller and were unsure whether the surface would hold up.
Here is the anchors-in-order version. Adjust for taste.
None of this is exotic. What it is, done consecutively, is a weekend that only works in Alamo, because two of the three anchors do not repeat in the neighboring towns on the same schedule.
The concerts end July 31 and do not resume until next summer. The farmers' market and the trail continue year-round, and the fall version of this same weekend, once the Livermore Valley harvest catches up, is arguably better than the July one. What changes at the Courtyard address between now and then is the piece worth watching. A first-year operator on a familiar corner is the kind of shift that quietly reshapes how a small commercial strip feels, and Alamo has fewer commercial strips than most East Bay towns, so the shift lands harder here.
If you are thinking about moves within the neighborhood or into it this year, the anchors above are more useful than any market summary. They tell you where your Friday, your Saturday, and your Sunday would land. When you are ready to talk about what any of that looks like on a specific street, Michael Forkas is happy to walk it with you. Let's Connect.
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