Victoria's history sits in layers you can walk between in an afternoon: Lekwungen village sites on the harbour, the brick outline of Fort Victoria underfoot, and the gilded houses coal money built. Three days, chronological.
Three Coast Salish welcome poles carved by Butch Dick mark Pallatsis, the Songhees village cleared in 1911 when the reserve was relocated. Bronze spindle-whorl markers along Westsong Way explain each Lekwungen place name. Dawn to dusk.
Red bricks set into the pavement trace the 1843 Hudson's Bay Company palisade, roughly 100 metres square. The 1889 Provincial Courthouse on the square held the assize court and the jail yard where Victoria's public hangings took place.
Built in 1855 for the families farming the Hudson's Bay Company's Craigflower estate, this is the oldest standing schoolhouse in western Canada. The manor across Admirals Road keeps its original hand-hewn Douglas fir timbers and 1856 fireplaces.
Laid out in 1873 on the Victorian garden-cemetery plan, with about 28,000 burials including Sir James Douglas, painter Emily Carr and coal baron Robert Dunsmuir. Sections were originally segregated by race and religion, and the grid still shows it.
Robert Dunsmuir's 1890 sandstone pile: 39 rooms over four floors, 87 stairs to the tower, and the largest surviving collection of residential stained glass in North America. He died in 1889, months before it was finished.
The 1863 Italianate house in James Bay where Carr was born in 1871, restored to the family's 1870s arrangement using her own descriptions in The Book of Small. Her father's parlour and the dining room are the closest thing to her childhood on record.
The O'Reilly family home from 1867, still holding roughly 13,000 original objects in place — the densest intact Victorian-era collection in western Canada. Lawn croquet and afternoon tea on the Gorge waterway garden.
Victoria's public cemetery from 1855 to 1873, now a lawn behind Christ Church Cathedral. Around 1,300 burials remain underneath; the headstones were shifted to the perimeter walls in the early 1900s when the ground became a park.
James Dunsmuir's 1908 castle by architect Samuel Maclure, built on 565 acres, later a naval officers' college and now Royal Roads University. Italian, Japanese and rose gardens survive from the original Boston-designed landscape plan.
Three coastal artillery batteries from the 1890s with intact underground magazines, searchlight emplacements and a 1940s command post. Fisgard, lit in 1860, was the first permanent lighthouse on Canada's west coast.
Prince and Princess Abkhazi began this garden in 1946, having met in Paris, spent the war interned separately in Shanghai and Germany, and reunited in Victoria. Glacial rock, native Garry oaks, and a 1946 modernist house now serving tea.
A national historic site laid out in 1903 by feng shui masters on a rocky point facing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Remains were exhumed here for shipment home to China until the practice stopped in 1937; the altar and burning towers still stand.