Greater Sudbury is a sprawling northern Ontario city built on one of the richest nickel deposits on Earth — a legacy of a meteorite impact some 1.85 billion years ago. The mining history is impossible to ignore: the 9-metre Big Nickel towers over the city on Big Nickel Road, the Superstack is visible from highways thirty kilometres away, and the blackened rock outcrops around town are a direct result of decades of smelter emissions that stripped the surrounding landscape bare. Since the 1970s, an ambitious regreening program has replanted millions of trees, and today the countryside around the city is recovering nicely.
What surprises most visitors is the lakes. Greater Sudbury contains over 330 of them, making it one of the most lake-dense cities in the world. Ramsey Lake sits right at the edge of downtown, and the Science North museum juts out over its waters on a rocky promontory — it's one of the best science museums in Canada and worth the trip alone. Its sister site Dynamic Earth explores the geology and mining history on the west side of town, and two kilometres below the surface the SNOLAB physics lab uses the same deep rock to look for dark matter. The city has a solid French-speaking population, and bilingual signs are common; the mix of working-class mining culture, academic life (Laurentian University is here), and the new Place des Arts cultural complex gives it an unpretentious, grounded character.
Sudbury isn't a destination in the way that Toronto or Quebec City is, but it's a genuine northern city with a distinct identity. Use it as a base for exploring the Canadian Shield, or stop here on a drive between southern Ontario and the north.