Ottawa concentrates more national collections per square kilometre than any other Canadian city, and its museums are architecture in their own right. Add artist-run centres, a bilingual theatre scene and Hintonburg's studios, and three days fill quickly.
Reopened 2018 in a KPMB-designed glass and blackened-steel volume on Daly Avenue, OAG holds the Firestone Collection of Canadian Art — roughly 1,600 works, including Group of Seven canvases. Galleries open at 10:00; admission is free.
Ernest Cormier's 1939 Art Deco-château hybrid, with a 12-metre Grand Entrance Hall in Quebec marble. Free guided tours run daily late May to August, hourly on weekdays the rest of the year; law students lead them in English and French.
Raymond Moriyama's 2005 building is a study in regeneration: a copper roof planted with grasses, angled concrete walls and Memorial Hall, where sunlight aligns with a single headstone at 11:00 on 11 November each year.
Ottawa's oldest surviving church (1841–1885), Gothic Revival in stone with twin tin-clad spires. The interior woodwork — over 90 carved figures by Philippe Parizeau and Louis-Philippe Hébert — is mahogany-toned pine, gilded and painted.
Douglas Cardinal's curving limestone building across the river opened in 1989. The Grand Hall holds the world's largest indoor collection of totem poles against a glass wall facing Parliament; the Canadian History Hall runs 15,000 years.
A small French dining room in a converted house on rue Notre-Dame-de-l'Île, two blocks from the museum, serving classic Québécois-French cooking since 1985. The surrounding Vieux-Hull streets are the oldest built fabric on the Gatineau side.
The 1912 Victoria Memorial Museum Building — Tudor-Gothic sandstone, known locally as the castle — housed Parliament after the 1916 fire. A glass lantern replaced the collapsed tower in 2010; inside are Cretaceous fossils and the blue whale skeleton.
Fred Lebensold's 1969 hexagonal Brutalist complex gained a glass Elgin Street atrium in 2017. Four halls host the NAC Orchestra plus English, French and Indigenous theatre departments — the only bilingual company of its scale in the country.
Ottawa's studio district: legal mural walls from the House of PainT festival line the lanes off Wellington Street West, with artist-run spaces, framers and the year-round Parkdale Market at the eastern end near Somerset Square.
Ottawa's Corso Italia, marked by the Piazza Dante arch, settled by Italian labourers who built the canal-side rail lines. Pasticceria Gelateria Italiana at 200 Preston has been making cannoli and espresso for the neighbourhood since 1979.
The 1898 Cattle Castle is the last 19th-century exhibition hall of its kind in Canada — a cast-iron and glass barrel vault, National Historic Site, where the Silver Seven won the Stanley Cup in 1904. Open-sided and free to walk through.
Founded in 1913 as the Ottawa Drama League, this is Canada's longest continuously operating community theatre. The King Edward Avenue building was rebuilt after a 1970 fire and still stages nine amateur productions a season.