▶ Watch the guideGive the first day to Stanley Park: rent a bike, ride the seawall, and finish at English Bay for the sunset. Day two is Granville Island in the morning and the Museum of Anthropology in the afternoon. Day three belongs to the North Shore, twenty minutes over the bridge. Eat in Chinatown and on Main Street rather than downtown.
Vancouver Travel Guide
▶ Video guideOpen the film page (8:42) →Vancouver is a young city in an old landscape. It was incorporated in 1886, burned to the ground ten weeks later and was rebuilt inside a year, which is why almost nothing downtown predates the 1890s while the forest at the end of the peninsula predates the country. The geography does the work.
Four hundred hectares of coastal rainforest at the end of the downtown peninsula, opened as a park in 1888 and still mostly forest rather than lawn. The seawall loop runs roughly nine kilometres and is flat the whole way. The nine poles at Brockton Point are the most visited site in British Columbia.
An industrial sandbar under the bridge, rebuilt in the 1970s as a market and workshop district and now the most reliable eating in the city: fishmongers with spot prawns in season, a wall of BC produce, and a food hall to eat over the water.
Arthur Erickson's 1976 concrete-and-glass building steps down toward the water, and the Great Hall holds house posts and totem poles at the scale they were carved for. Northwest Coast first and global second, with Bill Reid's The Raven and the First Men in its own rotunda.
A 140-metre span hanging 70 metres above the river, first strung in hemp and cedar in 1889. The bridge takes two minutes to cross; what fills an afternoon is the treetop walkway and the cliffwalk cantilevered off the granite. The most commercial attraction here, and still worth doing once.
The gondola climbs a mile up the North Shore in ten minutes and puts the whole delta, the Gulf Islands and the city at your feet. A lumberjack show, a grizzly refuge, and in winter a working ski hill twenty minutes from downtown. Underneath runs the Grind, which the city treats as a fitness test.
The original townsite, named for a saloon keeper who opened here in 1867 for the mill workers across the inlet. Cast-iron lamps, cobbles and Victorian warehouses. The steam clock is the photograph everyone takes and the youngest thing on the street, built in 1977 over a vent of the steam-heat system.
Housed in the old provincial courthouse, whose front steps double as the city's protest ground. The reason to come is Emily Carr: the gallery holds the largest collection of her work anywhere, and the forest paintings read differently after a morning in Stanley Park.
The silver geodesic dome at the head of False Creek is the one building everyone can name, built for Expo 86 and reopened as a science centre on 6 May 1989. Five floors of hands-on galleries aimed squarely at children, an OMNIMAX theatre inside the dome itself, and a plaza outside with the best straight-on view of the downtown skyline across the water.
The first full-size classical Chinese garden built outside China, put up in the mid-1980s by artisans from Suzhou working in Ming methods, with no nails or power tools. It is small on purpose, and it is the calmest half hour in the city.
The highest ground in the city, a pair of worked-out basalt quarries replanted as sunken gardens, with the skyline and the North Shore mountains lined up behind them. On the summit sits the Bloedel Conservatory, a triodetic dome holding tropical plants and about 120 free-flying birds, which is the one indoor thing to do here on a wet January afternoon.
Breweries, vintage shops and the best mid-priced eating in the city. If you have one evening away from downtown, spend it here.
The old Italian quarter, still full of espresso bars, now layered with Ethiopian and Vietnamese kitchens. The least polished street in the city.
Vancouver's counter-culture neighbourhood in the 1960s, where Greenpeace was founded, now a beach suburb of yoga studios and heritage houses.
Dense, leafy and walkable between Stanley Park and English Bay, with the country's best-known gay village along Davie Street.
The independent shopping strip: vintage clothing, record shops and bookshops. Nothing here is a chain and most of it opens late morning.
Downtown's flagship strip between Burrard and Denman, with a heavy Japanese and Korean presence in the food. Useful rather than characterful.
Canada's largest restaurant festival, three weeks from late January, with prix-fixe menus across hundreds of restaurants.
The city has tens of thousands of ornamental cherry trees, and for three weeks from late March the festival hangs events off them.
Ten days and hundreds of performances from mid-June, with a large free programme at Granville Island and the downtown plazas.
Shakespeare in tents in Vanier Park with the mountains behind the open back of the stage, running all summer since 1990.
A week of events ending in the parade down Robson and Denman to the Sunset Beach festival site.
The Pacific National Exhibition at Hastings Park, running since 1910: agricultural shows, a 1958 roller coaster and concerts.
Eleven days of features and documentaries in early October, with a long-standing focus on Canadian and East Asian work.
A German-style market beside the Convention Centre from mid-November, with wooden huts, mulled wine and a carousel.
Twelve kilometres south of downtown, and consistently rated among the best airports in North America. The Canada Line runs from both terminals to Waterfront station in about 26 minutes.
Three driverless SkyTrain lines, a dense bus network, and the SeaBus across Burrard Inlet in twelve minutes. Fares are zone-based on a Compass card, and single-zone at weekends.
The 1919 neoclassical terminus next to Main Street-Science World SkyTrain. VIA Rail leaves here for Toronto, Amtrak runs south to Seattle, and the coaches use the same building.
A hot dog with Japanese dressings: nori, bonito, teriyaki, daikon.
British Columbia's contribution to dessert: a crumb-and-coconut base, yellow custard, chocolate on top.
A fixed point in the calendar: the fishery opens in early May and runs six to eight weeks.
Sockeye, spring and coho, grilled on a cedar plank or smoked. Candied salmon is the version to take home.
Pressed rectangular sushi finished with a blowtorch, introduced here in 2008 and now on menus across the city.
Some of the best outside Hong Kong, and mostly not downtown. Order the har gow to judge the kitchen.
Pulled from the tanks live in Chinatown and Richmond and cooked ginger-and-scallion or salt-and-pepper.
An inside-out roll with the seaweed hidden, invented here for customers who would not eat nori or raw fish.
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