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Canada

6 city guides · North America

Cities in Canada (6)

North America
🇨🇦 Canada

Calgary

Calgary (population 1.4 million city, 1.6 million metropolitan area) is the largest city in Alberta and the economic capital of the Canadian oil industry — the third-largest financial centre in Canada after Toronto and Vancouver. Sitting at 1,045m elevation at the junction of the Bow and Elbow rivers, with the Canadian Rockies dramatically visible on the western horizon, Calgary is the gateway to Banff National Park (90km west) and Kananaskis Country. The city is world-famous for the Calgary Stampede — the ten-day rodeo, exhibition and festival held every July that claims the title "Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth," drawing 1.2 million visitors annually. Calgary hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics and is the sunniest major city in Canada, averaging 333 sunny days per year.

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North America
🇨🇦 Canada

Montreal

Montreal is Canada's most European city and arguably its most vibrant — a bilingual metropolis on an island in the St Lawrence River where Quebecois French culture, British colonial architecture, Jewish deli tradition and some of North America's finest immigrant communities have fused into something utterly distinctive. The Old Port (Vieux-Port) has 17th-century stone warehouses along cobblestone streets that feel more like Bordeaux than Ontario; the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood has the bicycle culture, sidewalk terrasses and depanneur convenience stores that define Montréal's daily life; and Mount Royal — the small mountain at the city's centre designed by Frederick Law Olmsted — gives the city its name and its most beloved park. Montreal is a university city (four universities, including McGill and Concordia) with a proportionate cultural output: the Just for Laughs comedy festival, the Montreal Jazz Festival (world's largest) and the MURAL street art festival have all made the city's cultural calendar globally significant. The food scene — smoked meat at Schwartz's, poutine (fries, cheese curds, gravy) from any fromagerie, bagels from St-Viateur or Fairmount (the best in North America, reputedly) and the innovative restaurant scene in Griffintown — is exceptional in ways that regularly surprise visitors expecting generic North American dining.

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North America
🇨🇦 Canada

Ottawa

Ottawa is the capital of Canada — not the largest or most famous city, but a place that combines extraordinary federal architectural heritage, one of the world's great museum clusters, the Rideau Canal (UNESCO, the longest ice skating rink on earth in winter), and a position at the border of Ontario and Quebec that makes it genuinely bilingual in a way Toronto and Montreal individually are not. The city was chosen as capital in 1857 by Queen Victoria (allegedly by pointing at a map — a story almost certainly apocryphal but beloved by Canadians) because it was defensible (upstream from the St Lawrence River, which Americans might sail up), on the border between French and English Canada, and because it was far enough from the American border to not be a tempting military target. The Parliament Buildings on the cliff above the Ottawa River — the Gothic Revival Centre Block (rebuilt after a 1916 fire), the Library of Parliament (the only structure that survived the fire with its Victorian reading room intact) and the Peace Tower — are among the most architecturally dramatic parliamentary buildings in the world, particularly when seen from Gatineau across the river or from the Rideau Canal locks below. The National Gallery of Canada (Moshe Safdie, 1988) and the Canadian Museum of History (Douglas Cardinal, 1989 — one of the most beautiful curved buildings in North America, across the river in Gatineau) anchor a museum complex that also includes the Canadian War Museum, the Canada Science and Technology Museum and the Canadian Museum of Nature, making Ottawa the most museum-rich city in Canada per capita.

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North America
🇨🇦 Canada

Quebec City

Québec City is the capital of the province of Québec and the only walled city north of Mexico in North America — a UNESCO World Heritage Site (1985) with the only remaining fortified city walls in North America, a 4.6 km stone wall encircling the Old City (Vieux-Québec) that was built by the French (from 1620), reinforced by the British (after the 1759 Conquest) and is still entirely intact; the old city within the walls has more 17th and 18th-century French architecture than anywhere outside France. The defining moment of Quebec City's history — and of Canadian history — was the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham: British General James Wolfe defeated French General the Marquis de Montcalm in a 15-minute battle on the plateau south of the city walls; both generals died in the battle; the French-speaking population came under British rule; and the cultural and linguistic duality that defines Canada (French and English as co-official languages) was born on this plateau. The city is built on a dramatic Cape Diamond promontory above the St. Lawrence River — a 98 m cliff face overlooking the St. Lawrence — and the château-style Fairmont Le Château Frontenac (1893, the most photographed hotel in the world by number of photographs) crowns the promontory. The Old Lower Town (Basse-Ville) has the Petit-Champlain neighbourhood (the narrowest commercial street in North America, cobblestoned, with the funicular connecting it to the Upper Town) and the Place Royale (the exact site where Samuel de Champlain founded New France in 1608, the oldest commercial district in North America). In winter (December-March), Québec City hosts the Carnaval de Québec (the world's largest winter carnival, 3 million visitors in 3 weeks) and the Ice Hotel (Hôtel de Glace, rebuilt annually with 3,000 tonnes of snow and 500 tonnes of ice).

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🇨🇦 Canada

Toronto

Toronto is the most multicultural city on earth — 51% of its 3.2 million residents were born outside Canada, making it the only major city in the world where immigrants are the majority. The result is a culinary and cultural landscape of extraordinary diversity: a Chinatown, a Little Italy, a Little Portugal, a Greektown, a Little India, a Koreatown and a Jamaican-Canadian neighbourhood all within cycling distance of downtown. Canada's largest city and its economic capital (the TSX is North America's third-largest stock exchange) also has the CN Tower (the most recognizable structure in Canada, at 553m the tallest freestanding structure in the Western Hemisphere until Dubai in 2010), the finest museum collection in Canada (Royal Ontario Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario designed by Frank Gehry), and the best food scene in North America outside New York and San Francisco — a city often underrated by visitors who don't stay long enough.

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🇨🇦 Canada

Vancouver

Vancouver (population 675,000 city, 2.8 million metropolitan area; the largest city in British Columbia and the third-largest in Canada) occupies one of the most extraordinarily beautiful natural settings of any major city in the world: the city is surrounded on three sides by water (the Burrard Inlet to the north, the English Bay and the Strait of Georgia to the west and south) and on a fourth side by the mountains (the North Shore Mountains — the dramatic range of peaks (Mount Seymour 1,448 m, Cypress Mountain 1,440 m, Grouse Mountain 1,211 m) that rise from sea level to 1,200-1,400 m within 20-30 km of the city centre; the view from central Vancouver combines the downtown skyscrapers with the snow-capped mountains in the background year-round — the most dramatic mountain-and-city panorama in North America). Vancouver is consistently ranked among the top three most liveable cities in the world (the Economist Intelligence Unit liveability index: Vancouver was in the top 3 from 2002-2015 and remains in the top 10) due to the combination of the natural environment (the Pacific Ocean, the mountain trails, the urban parks), the mild climate (the warmest Canadian city — the average January temperature is 3°C; no regular snow in the city itself), the multicultural population (the most ethnically diverse city in Canada: 52% of Vancouver residents are visible minorities (the largest non-white city in Canada); the Chinese-Canadian community (24% of metro Vancouver — the largest Chinese community per capita of any city outside Asia), the South Asian community, the Filipino community, the Japanese community (the historic Japantown (Powell Street) and the contemporary communities of Richmond)) and the urban sustainability credentials (Vancouver has committed to 100% renewable energy by 2025 and has the lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emissions of any major North American city).

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