Daylesford is one of Melbourne's favorite destinations due to it's natural beauty, massage and spa, restaurants and accommodation, and all within a 90 minute drive. Accommodation in Daylesford is fiercely fought over with hundreds of providers wanting you to stay in their bed and breakfast, self contained unit, motor inn or hotel.  To give you an idea of how many there are the town has at least 6 booking agencies.

Hepburn Springs is the sister town of Daylesford and when visiting you won't be able to tell one from the other.  They connect more like suburbs with the boundaries seamlessly joining together. Visitors frequently ask "How long will it take to get from Daylesford to Hepburn Springs?" The answer is "Several Minutes."  The town centres are only several kilometres apart.

Daylesford is a high rainfall region which gives it a lush, fresh look even when surrounding regions are dry and bare.  Many visitors comment how green the region is on their arrival from Melbourne.  A look at how tall the trees are in the surrounding forest gives an indication of the rainfall and growth rate of the area.

 

The Djadja Wurrung Aborigines are believed to be the original inhabitants of the region.

European settlers arrived around in the late 1830's led by Captain John Hepburn (Hence Hepburn Springs and the Hepburn Shire). By the late 1840's John Egan an1848, Irish immigrant took an area of land on Wombat Flat where the township now resides (Wombat Hill is the main hill with the botanical gardens in Daylesford). Egan and others discovered alluvial gold in 1851 where Lake Daylesford now is.  This caused a goldrush in the area and a population explosion with around three hundred diggers by the following year. By the mid 1850's the townsite was surveyed and named Wombat (curious if people would drive for a massage and spa if it was still called Wombat). Sir Charles Hotham renamed the town after the English birthplace of Warren Hastings who was the first governor-general of India and Daylesford was born.

By the end of the decade nearly three and a half thousand diggers were gold mining, nearly 800 of were Chinese sticking to alluvial workings.  The Chinese planted market gardens and had their own village with a Joss House and store (where the lake is now).   Daylesford became a municipality and a borough several years later. Local agriculture started to flourish in the 1860s to meet the demand including the opening of a flour mill.

Alluvial gold was all but gone by the end of the 1860's and the miners changed over to quartz reef mining until the 1830s. As the mining waned, the interest in the health giving mineral waters grew with the town also being used as a retreat for the Melbourne wealthy.  The Great Depression took away Daylesford's market until the 1980s when interest in the town began to grow quickly.