North America > Canada > British Columbia > Victoria
The capital of British Columbia and easily the most English-feeling city in Canada — double-decker buses, hanging flower baskets, afternoon tea at the Empress, and the dome of a Westminster-style parliament building reflected in the Inner Harbour. Founded in 1843 as a Hudson's Bay Company fort, it kept its colonial character even after Vancouver across the strait grew up and overtook it. The result is a small, walkable city of about 90,000 that feels older and quieter than its mainland cousin.
The heart of it all is the Inner Harbour, where seaplanes land in front of the floodlit Parliament Buildings and the ivy-clad Empress Hotel sits like a chateau on the waterfront — both designed by the prodigy architect Francis Rattenbury before he was 30. Behind the Empress, the Royal BC Museum holds one of the best Northwest Coast First Nations collections anywhere. A few blocks north is Canada's oldest Chinatown, with the narrow gambling-den alley of Fan Tan Alley still in place. The boutiques and brick warehouses of Lower Johnson Street ("LoJo") fill in the gap between the two.
Out beyond the city, the Butchart Gardens are unmissable — fifty acres of flowers planted in an old limestone quarry, lit up on summer evenings with fireworks on Saturdays. The waters around southern Vancouver Island are some of the best in the world for whale watching: orcas, humpbacks and minkes are spotted regularly on Zodiac trips out of the Inner Harbour from April to October. Inland, the Saanich Peninsula is a patchwork of vineyards and farm stands; Craigdarroch Castle in the uphill Rockland neighbourhood is a detour worth making, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria nearby holds significant Emily Carr paintings.
Victoria has the mildest climate in Canada. Snow is rare, summers are dry and pleasantly warm, and the gardens flower most of the year — the city counts crocuses in February as a civic event. Two days is enough for the headline sights; stay longer and you can use Victoria as a base for the rest of the island, from the surf at Tofino to the old-growth forests around Cowichan.