When Calls the Heart in Langley

Hope Valley has a postal code, sort of. The frontier town where Elizabeth Thatcher teaches school has stood on a North Langley farm since 2013, between barley fields and a cottonwood forest, and fans travel a long way to walk its main street. In 2017 the Langley Advance Times met two of them sitting in the saloon set, one from South Dakota and one from Washington State.

The show, quickly

When Calls the Heart is a family drama based on a novel by Alberta writer Janette Oke. A city-raised teacher takes a job in a small coal-mining town on the Canadian frontier and, season by season, the town becomes home. It premiered on Hallmark Channel in the U.S. on January 11, 2014, and on Super Channel in Canada that April. Thirteen seasons have aired, and Hallmark renewed it for a fourteenth in December 2025.

How Hope Valley got built in Langley

When the producers came looking in 2013, the MacInnes farm already had a cluster of old-looking buildings left over from earlier film sets, gathered into a little town (the Jamestown page has that story). Around it was what they also needed: a real working farm with fields, hills and a cottonwood forest. The Langley Advance Times reported in 2017 that it was a combination producers Michael Landon Jr. and Brian Bird couldn’t pass up.

Construction for the series started in the summer of 2013 and wasn’t finished when the cameras rolled, so the builders worked a step ahead of the film crews. When the paper visited the set in March 2014, near the end of season one, it found:

• Real interiors, not just fronts. Each building along the dirt main street had a fully dressed set inside: an office with a working fireplace, a hotel and saloon that also served as the schoolhouse, a mercantile with shelves of period goods.
• Three row houses that become dozens. East of town, across a field, stood three nearly identical miners’ houses. Visual effects multiplied them on screen.
• A coal mine made of foam. Further east, rails ran out of the woods into a mine entrance where ground rubber stood in for coal dust and the rock face was disguised foam.
• Almost everything shot on the farm. Crews only travelled for big scenic vistas, to Coquitlam and Pitt Lake.

The buildings are temporary in the farming sense: the family told Township council in 2017 that the 13 set buildings sit on skids and don’t disturb the soil underneath.

A farm first

This is the part of the story most fans don’t see. The MacInnes family has farmed here since 1977; it was a dairy until 1992, then horses and cottonwood, and today it’s barley, hops, hazelnuts, apples and honey, plus a farm brewery. The family has said film income is what keeps the agriculture going.

In 2017 that arrangement hit a snag. New Agricultural Land Commission rules limited filming on land in the Agricultural Land Reserve to 10 non-consecutive days a year, and the show was filming five days a week for five months. The family applied to the ALC to have the set’s corner of the farm treated as non-farm use for 10 years. They told council that about 3% of the 95-acre farm was used for filming and 76% for farming, that filming had happened on the property since 2005, and that their neighbours, including Thunderbird Show Park, supported them. Township council gave its zoning approval unanimously on September 11, 2017.

The show also borrows the farm itself. Locality Brewing says the barley fields, orchards and school gardens have all been worked into Hope Valley. “If we are doing barley, they’ll use it in the background of their scene,” Melanie MacInnes told the Langley Advance Times in 2017.

Season by season

When	What happened in Langley
Summer 2013	Set construction starts on the farm
Early 2014	Season one wraps on the Langley set
2017	Show filming August to December, five days a week; council backs the ALC application; about 450 fans tour the set at the Hearties Family Reunion
July 8 to Nov. 8, 2024	Season 12 films in Langley; the story moves into the 1920s
Summer and fall 2025	Season 13 films in Langley
Summer and fall 2026	Season 14 (12 episodes) filming, according to YVRShoots

Dates for 2024 to 2026 come from YVRShoots’ production listings.

Seeing Hope Valley for yourself

Start at the brewery. Locality Brewing is on the same farm and is open to the public, with picnic tables among the hops. You won’t see the set from there, but you’re on the land the show uses, and the brewery lists the farm’s film history on its website.

Set tours, by booking only. MacInnes Farms’ tours page describes a roughly two-hour tour that starts at the brewery and goes out to Hope Valley by golf cart, with some walking. It lists $50 per adult and $35 per child, or $35 a person for groups of five or more, and you book through the page. Tours don’t run while the show is filming (roughly June to November). The newest notice on that page talks about 2024 and 2025 dates, so contact the farm to confirm before you plan a trip around it.

Fan events. The Hearties Family Reunion, a fan weekend with set visits and cast meet-and-greets, has been held in Langley; the 2017 edition included a meet-and-greet at the Cascades convention centre in Langley City.

Once a year, everyone gets in. In July the Jamestown streets host Gone Country, a ticketed country music fundraiser. The next one is July 17, 2027.

Please don’t wander in. Outside of tours and events, the set is on private, working farmland, and in season it’s an active film set with crews working to a tight schedule. Book a tour, or wave from the brewery patio.

Get there

More Langley filming: TV shows filmed in Langley.