The third of the Comox Valley's three towns is the smallest and the most distinctive — a former Vancouver Island Coal Company company-town that once had a population of 13,000, one of British Columbia's largest Chinatowns, and a Japanese settlement. After the mines closed in 1966 the town shrank to a few hundred, but a generation of mountain bikers, brewers, and artists have revived its compact wooden main street.
Dunsmuir Avenue now has good coffee, two craft breweries, an excellent bookshop, and the trailheads for the Cumberland mountain-bike trail network — more than 100 km of single-track running into the surrounding second-growth forest.