The causeway to Oak Island carries traffic again. Cars cross it, park in a lot on the island, and their passengers walk into a museum and a shop that had been closed for six years.
Most of what you will find online still has the island down as private property, shut to the public and reachable only on a booked tour. That is out of date. Your author was there in July 2026 and saw it for himself: a full parking lot, families working their way round the museum, and a steady stream through the Treasure Shop.
Open after a Six-Year Closure
Guided walking tours ran on the island for years before the pandemic. Oak Island Tours Inc., the company through which Rick and Marty Lagina hold their stake, released roughly 10,000 tickets a year in a single online batch, and they reportedly sold out in under three minutes. Charles Barkhouse, the island's historian and a familiar face on the show, was the guide most visitors remember.
Then COVID-19 stopped tourism across Nova Scotia in 2020. The tours ended and the museum closed. What nobody expected was how long the closure would hold. The island stayed shut from 2021 through 2025, six seasons in all. Oak Island is an active excavation and a working television production at the same time, and moving visitors around 140 acres of heavy equipment was never going to be simple to reconcile.
That has now changed.
Oak Island and the Tourism Boom→
Equipment and Technology on Oak Island→
The Causeway Carries Public Traffic
The causeway from Crandall's Point to Oak Island is open. There is no gate to negotiate and no permission to arrange in advance. Drive across, follow the road, and park in the lot on the island.
Take it slowly. The causeway is single lane, the sightlines across the water are short, and there is not enough width for two vehicles to pass. The signs at the approach say as much.
For most of the show's run this was where the public stopped. It now carries visitors onto the island.
The Museum and the Treasure Shop
Two buildings are open to walk-in visitors, seven days a week. The museum, formally the Oak Island Interpretive Centre, holds the displays: maps, documents, and cases of recovered material covering the search from the 1795 discovery forward. Admission is five dollars a person, and parking is included.
The Treasure Shop stands about fifty metres away in its own building, stocked with official Curse of Oak Island merchandise, books, and pieces made from Oak Island wood. What the museum and the shop take in goes back into the island itself, funding the visitor operation and the preservation of the site and its history for the people who come to see it.
Museum hours are 10:00am to 5:00pm Monday to Friday, and 8:30am to 6:00pm on Saturday and Sunday. Both buildings keep a longer calendar than the tram tours below, so you can visit them outside the tour season.
The Money Pit Express Tram Tour
Everything past those two buildings is reached on a booked tour. It runs aboard the Money Pit Express, a covered and accessible tram, and takes about two hours. The route follows Centre Road past the Money Pit area, Smith's Cove, the swamp, and the other places that turn up week after week on the show, with narration from a guide who knows the ground intimately including long time Curse of Oak Island cast member Charles Barkhouse.
The 2026 season runs from May 2 to October 31. Departures are Wednesdays at 6:30pm, and Saturdays and Sundays at 9:00am, 12:30pm and 3:30pm.
Tram tickets are 99 dollars for adults, 35 dollars for children aged 6 to 12, and free for children under 5. Booking is through Oak Island Legend at oakislandlegend.com, and it has to be done in advance. Visitors are asked to arrive half an hour before departure. Tours run in rain as well as sun, and refunds come only when a tour is cancelled for extreme weather. If you need accessible seating, say so when you book rather than on the day.
Demand has outstripped capacity again. In July 2026 the operator reported tours fully booked with a waitlist in place. If the tram is the reason for the trip, book well ahead rather than turning up and hoping for a seat.
Where Visitors Can and Cannot Go
On foot you reach the museum and the Treasure Shop, but you can't go beyond them. Remember at all times that the island is a private property.
Season 14 is being filmed on the island right through the summer of 2026, which means the search is happening around you while you visit. Filming and excavation areas stay closed, as a live set always does, and the tour is built to work alongside them.
The upside is that there is a fair chance you will run into someone from the show while you are there. Cast and crew are on the ground most days, and visitors do cross paths with them. It is not something the tour promises or can arrange, but it happens often enough to be worth hoping for.
Seeing Oak Island from the Water
There is a third way to see the place, and it skips the causeway entirely. Salty Dog Sea Tours runs narrated trips around the island from the Oak Island Marina aboard a covered tritoon, taking in the shoreline sites from the water along with the wider Mahone Bay and Chester coast. Tony Sampson, who owns the operation, has worked on the series as both cast and crew.
If the tram is booked out, this is the closest you will get to the ground.
Getting There
Oak Island sits in Mahone Bay, on the south shore of Nova Scotia, in Lunenburg County. Chester is the nearest village of any size, Western Shore faces the island directly, and Halifax is about an hour away by road.
From Halifax, take Highway 103 southwest and leave at Exit 9 toward Gold River. Coming up from the South Shore, take Exit 10 toward Mahone Bay and Martins River. Either way you join Crandall Point Road, which runs down to the causeway with the parking lot immediately across.
Two things worth knowing from having been there. The site is coastal and exposed, so the weather turns faster than any forecast suggests, and the tram is covered but not heated. And the parking lot is finite: on a weekend with three departures and walk-in traffic, arriving early is the difference between parking on the island and parking somewhere else.
For what the tour route passes, the interactive map marks each location by name. The Artifact Vault catalogues the finds, a number of which are on display in the museum. For how a private island became one of the most requested destinations in the province, see Oak Island and the Tourism Boom.
Sources
Operator information: Oak Island Legend, tour booking pages and published operator notices, July 2026. Hours, admission, tour times and pricing are the operator's own published figures and are subject to change without notice. Confirm before travelling.
Tourism listings: Tourism Nova Scotia listings for the Oak Island Interpretive Center and Salty Dog Sea Tours, consulted July 2026.
Access details on this page were accurate in July 2026 and are reviewed each season. Last update July 25, 2026.
