Boca Raton Now Has Two Sunday Markets, and They Are Not the Same Thing

Ask a Boca Raton resident where the Sunday market is and most will send you to the Clock Tower at Royal Palm Place. That answer used to be complete. It is not anymore, and for roughly five months of the year, it is not even the right one.

Boca Raton is running two Sunday markets that share a lot of surface features, the same day, similar hours, produce tables, live music, free parking, and names close enough to blur together in a text thread. But they were built by different people for different reasons, they operate on different calendars, and knowing which one you actually want changes your Sunday.

Same Day, Two Different Origin Stories

The market at Royal Palm Place carries real history. The property opened in 1963 as Royal Palm Plaza, and its farmers market has come and gone over the decades. It went dark for four years, citing staffing limits, before the shopping center's marketing team brought it back on February 9, 2025, timed to the property's 60th anniversary. That's the version most locals remember: a legacy market, tied to a landmark, worth reviving for an occasion.

But the market running there under the name Boca Green Market has a smaller, scrappier backstory that gets far less attention. Local press has credited its founding to a vendor named Fairy Chrissy, who runs Enchanted Knot Fairy Hair, and who set it up originally to give her hair extension business, and a handful of fellow vendors, somewhere to sell on Sundays. What started as about 14 additional vendors alongside her own stall grew into the market people now associate with the Clock Tower, and it now caps out around 53 vendors at full capacity.

So the market people call an institution is, week to week, run by someone whose day job is sparkling hair extensions. Both things are true. The venue has 60 years of pedigree. The Sunday operation inside it was built from scratch by a single small business owner filling a gap she saw in East Boca.

The Market That Refuses to Take a Summer Off

Across town, a different market started from an even smaller premise. Jess and Adam Del Vecchio began by delivering raw milk to Boca Raton households through a business called Raw Milk Boca. Demand outgrew delivery, so they started pickup events. Those pickup events outgrew themselves too, and in April 2025 the couple launched a full Sunday market at 7900 Glades Road, near the Turnpike, with somewhere around 20 to 25 vendors.

It didn't stay there long. Within six months the market had outgrown that lot entirely and relocated to the Boca Raton Innovation Campus, known locally as BRiC, setting up in Parking Lot H at 4950 Communication Avenue, behind Miller's Ale House. By October 2025, it had already grown past 75 vendors. Reporting from this past summer puts the count above 80, spanning raw dairy, sourdough, cold-pressed juice, tallow skincare, permanent jewelry, and a 14-year-old vendor named Mimi's Granola selling organic sprouted granola.

The detail that separates it most from its Clock Tower counterpart is the calendar. The Del Vecchios have said outright that they intend to stay open all year, specifically because they want to serve locals rather than a seasonal visitor crowd. Vendors start setting up before sunrise, and the market adds a free community yoga session at 9:30 a.m. before the stalls fill in.

The Two Markets, Side by Side

What the Closed Sign Actually Tells You

The gap between a market that closes for the summer and one that explicitly refuses to isn't a scheduling quirk. It tells you who each one is built for.

A market that runs October through May, inside a retail district full of restaurants and boutiques, is designed around a stroll: browse the stalls, walk into a shop, sit down for a coffee, treat the morning as part of a downtown outing that only makes sense when the weather cooperates and the shopping center is fully staffed. That's the Royal Palm Place rhythm, and it's a good one if that's the Sunday you want.

A market that sets up in an office park lot behind a chain restaurant, twelve months a year, in a Florida July, is optimized for something else entirely: a standing habit, not an occasion. The Del Vecchios said as much when describing why they stay open through summer, when attendance drops from thousands of visitors in peak season to hundreds in the off months. They're building for the people who show up every week regardless, not for the crowd that only comes out once the heat breaks.

Neither approach is wrong. But they answer different questions, and a resident who wants a reliable Sunday habit twelve months a year is going to be disappointed every May when the Clock Tower stalls disappear until fall.

Before You Go This Fall

A few things worth checking before you plan your Sunday, especially with the season changing over in the next few weeks:

• Boca Green Market's own site currently lists this fall's season, September 27 through May 2, at 5th Ave Shops, 1954 NE Fifth Ave, with hours of 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. That's a different address and hour block than the Clock Tower version many residents remember from past seasons, so confirm the location before you head out on opening Sunday.
• Boca Farmers Market at BRiC runs every Sunday, all year, so it's the one to default to if you're planning a weekend and don't want to check a calendar first.
• Both markets are free to enter, offer free parking, and welcome dogs.
• If you want an evening option instead of a Sunday morning one, the city ran a monthly Night Market at Sanborn Square as part of last season's centennial programming. Whether that continues in the same form this year wasn't confirmed as of this writing, so it's worth a quick check with the city before building an evening around it.

The overlap in names isn't an accident of branding. It's a sign that Boca Raton's appetite for a weekly market outgrew any single organizer's ability to run it, and two very different people, a hair extension vendor and a raw milk delivery couple, both looked at the same gap and built something to fill it. Knowing which one you're walking into is the difference between a stroll through a historic shopping district and a standing Sunday habit that doesn't care what month it is.

Whether you're settling into a Sunday routine or still learning the rhythm of a neighborhood you're new to, that kind of detail is exactly what Boca Delray Properties spends its time tracking. If you're weighing a move to Boca Raton, Delray Beach, or anywhere along the coast between them, Let's Connect.