Give the first day to Stanley Park: rent a bike at Denman Street, ride the seawall, stop at the Brockton Point poles and finish at English Bay for the sunset. Day two is Granville Island in the morning and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in the afternoon, which holds the best collection of Northwest Coast art anywhere. Day three belongs to the North Shore, twenty minutes over the Lions Gate Bridge, where Grouse Mountain and the Capilano and Lynn Canyon suspension bridges are. Eat in Chinatown, on Main Street and along Kingsway rather than downtown, and keep a fourth day for Squamish or Whistler up the Sea to Sky Highway.
Vancouver Outdoors
▶ Video guide
Vancouver is a young city in an old landscape. It was incorporated on 6 April 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: ocean on one side, the Coast Mountains on the other, and 400 hectares of rainforest a fifteen-minute walk from the office towers. That is also the honest limitation. Vancouver has fewer set-piece monuments than cities half its size, and the case for coming is the setting, the food that a century of Chinese, Japanese, South Asian and Vietnamese migration built, and how fast you can get out of town: a beach at breakfast, a gondola at noon, Squamish granite by mid-afternoon. Come between May and September. The rest of the year is grey and wet, and the city simply puts on a shell and carries on.
The 10 best things to do in Vancouver
1
Stanley Park and the seawall
Park· Stanley Park Drive, West End
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 around it runs roughly nine kilometres past Coal Harbour, the Brockton Point poles, Prospect Point under the Lions Gate Bridge and Third Beach, and it is flat the whole way. Walk it for the views back at the skyline, or ride it in an hour. The nine poles at Brockton Point are the most visited site in British Columbia, and the interpretive panels beside them are worth the ten minutes.
TimeHalf a day
CostFree
Best atEarly morning
TipWheels go counter-clockwise only on the seawall
An industrial sandbar under the Granville Bridge, rebuilt in the 1970s as a market, theatre and workshop district and now the most reliable eating in the city. The Public Market is the heart of it: fishmongers with spot prawns in season, a wall of BC produce, Oyama sausage, Lee’s Donuts and a food hall to eat over the water. The rest of the island holds the Emily Carr galleries, a brewery, kids’ market and the Arts Club theatre.
Time2 to 3 hours
CostFree to enter
Best atWeekday mornings
TipArrive by Aquabus or False Creek Ferries from the foot of Hornby Street
Museum· 6393 NW Marine Dr, University of British Columbia
Arthur Erickson’s 1976 concrete-and-glass building steps down toward the water, and the Great Hall behind that glass holds house posts and totem poles at the scale they were carved for. The collection is Northwest Coast first and global second, and Bill Reid’s yellow cedar sculpture The Raven and the First Men sits in its own rotunda. The museum reopened in June 2024 after eighteen months closed for a seismic upgrade.
A 140-metre span hanging 70 metres above the Capilano River, first strung in hemp and cedar in 1889 and rebuilt in steel since. The bridge itself takes two minutes to cross; what fills an afternoon is the Treetops Adventure walkway through the Douglas firs on the far bank and the Cliffwalk cantilevered off the granite. It is the most commercial attraction in the region and it is still worth doing once.
The Skyride 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. At the top there is a lumberjack show, a grizzly refuge, a wind turbine you can ride to the top of, and in winter a working ski hill twenty minutes from downtown. Underneath it runs the Grouse Grind, 2.9 kilometres and 853 metres of relentless staircase that the city treats as a fitness test.
The original townsite, named for Gassy Jack Deighton, who opened a saloon here in 1867 for the mill workers across the inlet. It is a National Historic Site: cast-iron lamps, cobbles, Victorian brick warehouses now full of design shops and restaurants. The steam clock at Water and Cambie is the photograph everyone takes and the youngest thing on the street, built in 1977 over a vent of the city’s steam-heat system. It whistles the Westminster chimes on the quarter hour.
Housed in the old provincial courthouse, a 1906 Francis Rattenbury building whose front steps double as the city’s protest ground. The collection runs to modern and contemporary work from the Pacific Rim, but the reason to come is Emily Carr: the gallery holds the largest collection of her work anywhere, and the forest paintings read very differently after a morning in Stanley Park.
Time2 hours
CostTicketed
Best atFriday evening
TipThe Free First Friday Nights run from 4pm to 8pm and are busy
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 1985 and 1986 by artisans from Suzhou working in Ming-dynasty methods, with no nails, screws or power tools. It is small on purpose: jade-green water, limestone from Lake Tai, pavilions and a covered walkway that changes the view every few steps. A National Historic Site since 2016, and the calmest half hour in the city.
Time1 hour
CostTicketed
Best atWeekday mornings
TipThe ticketed garden and the free park beside it are two different places
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.
Time1 to 2 hours
CostPark free
Best atSunset
TipThe view is from the plaza by Henry Moore’s Knife Edge Two Piece
Four. One for Stanley Park and the downtown peninsula, one for Granville Island and the Museum of Anthropology, one for the North Shore mountains and bridges, and a fourth for Squamish or Whistler up the Sea to Sky Highway. Three works if you drop the day trip.
What is the best time of year to visit Vancouver?+
July and August are the warmest and driest months, with highs around 22°C and the festival calendar at full stretch. June and September are nearly as good with fewer people. November through January is the wet, dark end of the year: expect rain most days and short afternoons.
Do you need a car in Vancouver?+
Not for the city. SkyTrain, buses and the seawall cover downtown, the west side and Richmond, and downtown parking is expensive. A car helps on the North Shore and is close to essential for Squamish, Whistler or the Fraser Valley, though coaches run to Whistler and buses reach Grouse Mountain and Lynn Canyon.
Is the Capilano Suspension Bridge worth the money?+
Once, if you want the Treetops walkway and the Cliffwalk as well as the bridge, and it is the most expensive attraction in the region. If you only want a suspension bridge in a rainforest, Lynn Canyon has one 50 metres above its creek and charges nothing.
How do you get from Vancouver airport to downtown?+
The Canada Line SkyTrain, from stations at both terminals to Waterfront in about 26 minutes. A YVR AddFare is charged on top of the normal fare for journeys starting at the airport, which does not apply on the way back out. Taxis and rideshare work from the arrivals level and take longer in traffic.
Where to eat
Best restaurants in Vancouver
The dining rooms the rest of the country flies in for, and the counters three generations of migration built.
Vikram Vij’s room on Cambie Street is where Indian cooking in Canada stopped being a buffet and started being a restaurant. Lamb popsicles in fenugreek cream is the dish nobody skips, and the cooking is Indian technique on British Columbian ingredients rather than a regional recreation.
Hidekazu Tojo has been behind this bar since 1988 and is the chef who claims, with a good case, to have invented the California roll for Vancouver diners nervous about seaweed and raw fish. Sit at the counter, say omakase, and let him decide.
A Québécois dining room done as a Montreal bistro of the 1940s, dark wood and lace curtains, in a Railtown block that looks like nothing from the street. Duck, pike quenelles, tourtière. Book well ahead.
Japanese-Italian on the top floor of a Chinatown walk-up, styled as a 1960s Tokyo jazz cafe and one of the highest-ranked rooms in the country. Tagliatelle with uni, or the sesame-crusted albacore.
The tasting-menu restaurant that put Mount Pleasant on the national list, cooking British Columbian produce with fermentation and a very light hand. There is an à la carte counter as well as the menu.
A wood-fire osteria on Kingsway with hand-rolled pasta, spit-roasted meat and a room loud enough that nobody minds children in it. The most consistently good Italian in the city.
The Nguyen family’s second-generation Vietnamese room on Main Street, from the parents’ 1980s restaurant. The menu explains regional differences properly, and the bún chả and the shaking beef are both worth the wait for a table.
A Chinatown institution run by a Cambodian-Chinese family, and the reason people queue on East Georgia. Order the butter beef and the fried chicken wings, which are the two dishes the city argues about in absolute terms.
The room that introduced aburi sushi to Vancouver in 2008: pressed oshi rice, flame-seared salmon, a smear of sauce. Waterfront tables look out at Canada Place and the North Shore.
The city’s social beach, looking back at downtown with the mountains behind it. Kits Pool beside it is saltwater, 137 metres long and the longest outdoor pool in the country, open through the summer season only.
Downtown’s own beach, three minutes from Denman Street and the best sunset in the city. A-maze-ing Laughter, the fourteen oversized bronze figures by Yue Minjun, stands in the park behind it.
Two hundred and fifty hectares of North Shore rainforest with a suspension bridge 50 metres above the creek, built in 1912, plus waterfalls, swimming holes and an ecology centre. All of it free, which is the point.
The furthest west of the city beaches, with a tidal flat that walks out several hundred metres at low water and a straight view back down the harbour. Quieter than Kits and better for a fire-pit evening.
The 874-hectare forest that separates UBC from the rest of the city, with about 73 kilometres of trail through second-growth cedar and hemlock. Ten minutes from the Museum of Anthropology and usually empty.
A village on Indian Arm at the far end of North Vancouver, with rental kayaks, a donut shop people queue for and the short steep climb to the Quarry Rock lookout. The trail has closed for repairs more than once, so check before you drive out.
Two point nine kilometres, 853 metres of climbing, almost all of it stairs, and thousands of people a day in summer. Uphill only, and the gondola down is a separate ticket. Open in the snow-free season.
Grass, driftwood and a sailing centre, with the smallest crowd of the westside beaches and the best angle on the freighters anchored in English Bay. The Seaside Greenway runs straight through it.
A small Main Street tasting room with a chalkboard that changes weekly and no television anywhere. Order a taster flight and let the bar tell you what is on.
The biggest of the east-side breweries, with a canteen, a patio and a rotating list long enough to make a decision difficult. Anchor of the East Vancouver brewery crawl along Powell and Triumph.
An apothecary-styled cocktail bar in Chinatown, working with Chinese herbs and bitters, and a fixture on the continent’s best-bar lists for over a decade. Late, dark and reliably good.
Gastown’s brewpub since 1995, and it takes its name literally: the kettles are fired by the same downtown steam line that runs the clock two blocks away. A big room with harbour views from the lower floor.
Up an unmarked staircase on Maple Tree Square, a first-floor room with tall windows over the oldest corner in the city and a cocktail list that has held its standard since 2009.
The city’s own museum in Vanier Park, strongest on the twentieth century: the neon sign collection from when Vancouver had more neon per head than anywhere in North America, and a clear-eyed account of how the city was built and on whose land.
A small downtown gallery devoted to the Haida artist Bill Reid and to contemporary Northwest Coast work. An hour here is the best introduction to the art you will then see everywhere in the city.
A photography and contemporary art gallery in a mirrored shed on the North Vancouver waterfront, twelve minutes across the inlet on the SeaBus. The upper gallery looks straight back at the downtown skyline.
Built around the St. Roch, the RCMP schooner that was the first vessel to cross the Northwest Passage from west to east, now a National Historic Site sitting indoors under an A-frame. You go aboard.
Two million specimens under the UBC campus, and a 26-metre blue whale skeleton hanging in the glass lobby, the largest on display in Canada. Combine it with the Museum of Anthropology, ten minutes away.
Planetarium shows, an observatory and a hands-on gallery in the crab-fountain building next to the Museum of Vancouver. Aimed at families, and the one indoor plan that survives a wet afternoon in Kitsilano.
A public non-collecting gallery on Nelson Street showing new commissions from Canadian and international artists, free to enter, and usually the sharpest exhibition programme downtown.
Cobbles, cast-iron lamps and Victorian warehouses on the site of the original settlement. Design shops, restaurants and the steam clock. The blocks east of Carrall Street run into the Downtown Eastside, which is a different city and worth knowing before you wander.
One of the oldest and largest Chinatowns in North America, with the Millennium Gate on Pender, the Sun Yat-Sen garden, herbalists and bakeries alongside the newer bars on Keefer. It has thinned out over two decades and is worth walking while it is still itself.
Independent shops and breweries · Main St from 2nd to 30th
Breweries, vintage shops, tattoo studios and the best mid-priced eating in the city, running south from Broadway along Main. If you have one evening away from downtown, spend it here.
The old Italian quarter, still full of espresso bars where the football is on, now layered with Ethiopian, Salvadoran and Vietnamese kitchens. The least polished commercial street in the city and the most lived-in.
Vancouver’s counter-culture neighbourhood in the 1960s, where Greenpeace was founded, now a beach suburb of yoga studios and heritage houses. West 4th Avenue for shopping, the beach for everything else.
Dense, leafy and walkable, wedged between Stanley Park and English Bay, with the country’s best-known gay village along Davie Street and a rainbow crossing at Bute. Denman Street is where you rent the bike.
A hundred and thirty-five kilometres up the Sea to Sky Highway, about two hours by car or coach. Two mountains joined by the Peak 2 Peak gondola, a pedestrian village, and enough in summer (bike park, lakes, alpine trails) to justify the drive out of ski season.
Under an hour from the city and the best value on this list: a gondola to a viewing platform and suspension bridge above Howe Sound, with the Stawamus Chief granite monolith opposite and trails at the top.
The provincial capital on Vancouver Island, reached by a 1 hour 35 minute BC Ferries crossing from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay through the Gulf Islands. A long day trip and a better overnight.
A working fishing village at the mouth of the Fraser in Richmond, forty minutes out. Buy salmon and spot prawns off the boats at Fisherman’s Wharf, then tour the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, built in 1894 and now a National Historic Site.
A twenty-minute ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Snug Cove, walk-on and hourly. A pub, a bookshop, a lake trail and Killarney Lake in an afternoon, with no car needed at either end.
The Hudson’s Bay Company post on the Fraser where the colony of British Columbia was proclaimed in 1858, now a Parks Canada site with palisades, a cooperage and gold-panning. An hour east, and the village around it is a good lunch.
Public market · 123 Carrie Cates Ct, North Vancouver
A two-floor public market at the North Vancouver SeaBus terminal, food below and shops above, with the harbour and the skyline out the windows. The twelve-minute crossing is half the reason to go.
Shopping street · Main St from Broadway to 30th Ave
The independent shopping strip: vintage clothing, record shops, small design labels and bookshops, thickest between Broadway and 30th Avenue. Nothing here is a chain and most of it opens late morning.
Downtown’s flagship strip between Burrard and Denman, international brands with a heavy Japanese and Korean presence in the food between them. Useful rather than characterful.
Several hundred stalls of street food, mostly Asian, on a lot beside Bridgeport station, weekend evenings from late April into the autumn. Take the Canada Line: parking is a fee and a queue.
Night market · Shipbuilders’ Square, North Vancouver
Friday evenings through the summer in Shipbuilders’ Square by the Lonsdale Quay SeaBus terminal: food trucks, makers and live music on the old shipyard apron. Free to walk in.
Time your trip around the dates the city plans its year on.
January
Dine Out Vancouver Festival
Canada’s largest restaurant festival, run by Destination Vancouver over about three weeks from late January, with prix-fixe menus across several hundred restaurants plus tastings and dinners. The 2026 edition ran from 21 January to 8 February.
March to April
Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival
The city has tens of thousands of ornamental cherry trees, and for three weeks from late March the festival hangs walks, talks, haiku and a bike ride off them. Most of it is free. Queen Elizabeth Park and the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival map are where to start.
June to July
Vancouver International Jazz Festival
Ten days and hundreds of performances across the city from mid-June, with a large free programme at Granville Island, David Lam Park and downtown plazas. The 2026 edition ran 19 June to 5 July.
June to September
Bard on the Beach
Shakespeare in tents in Vanier Park with the mountains and English Bay behind the open back of the stage, running all summer since 1990. The 2026 season ran 9 June to 19 September.
Late July to August
Vancouver Pride
A week of events ending in the parade down Robson and Denman to the Sunset Beach festival site. The 2026 parade fell on Sunday 2 August. Davie Village is the centre of it either side.
August to September
PNE Fair
The Pacific National Exhibition at Hastings Park, running since 1910: agricultural shows, a wooden roller coaster from 1958, nightly concerts and a great deal of fried food. The 2026 fair ran 22 August to 7 September.
October
Vancouver International Film Festival
Eleven days of features and documentaries in early October across downtown cinemas, with a long-standing focus on Canadian and East Asian work. The 44th edition ran 1 to 11 October 2026.
November to December
Vancouver Christmas Market
A German-style market at Jack Poole Plaza beside the Convention Centre, from mid-November to Christmas Eve, with wooden huts, mulled wine and a carousel. Ticketed, and cheaper on a weekday evening.
Getting around
Vancouver transport & airports
How to arrive, and how to move once you have.
YVR
Vancouver International Airport (YVR)
On Sea Island in Richmond, twelve kilometres south of downtown, and consistently rated among the best airports in North America. The Canada Line SkyTrain runs from both the domestic and international terminals to Waterfront station downtown in about 26 minutes. A YVR AddFare applies to journeys starting at the airport stations, which is why an airport trip costs more than a normal fare.
Three driverless SkyTrain lines (Expo, Millennium and Canada), a dense bus network, and the SeaBus across Burrard Inlet to Lonsdale Quay in twelve minutes. Fares are zone-based on a Compass card: adult stored value is $2.85 for one zone, $4.20 for two and $5.40 for three as of 1 July 2026, with a $12.55 DayPass. Buses are single-zone at any hour, and so is the whole system after 6.30pm and at weekends.
The 1919 neoclassical terminus at 1150 Station Street, next to Main Street-Science World SkyTrain. VIA Rail’s Canadian leaves here for Toronto, Amtrak Cascades runs south to Seattle and Portland, and the intercity coaches use the same building.
Downtown is small enough to cross on foot in half an hour, and the seawall network makes cycling the fastest way along the water. Mobi is the public bike share, with stations across downtown and the west side. The Aquabus and False Creek Ferries run small boats between Granville Island, Yaletown and the foot of Hornby Street from early morning to late evening.
The local delicacy and a fixed point in the calendar: the fishery opens in early May and runs six to eight weeks. Buy them live off the boats at Steveston or the Fisherman’s Wharf dock, or eat them raw at a sushi counter while the season holds.
Wild Pacific salmon
Sockeye, spring and coho, grilled on a cedar plank in the West Coast manner or smoked. Candied salmon, cured in sugar and smoked to a chewy strip, is the version to take home from Granville Island.
Aburi oshi sushi
Pressed rectangular sushi finished with a blowtorch, introduced here by Miku in 2008 and now on menus across the city. The flame-seared salmon oshi with a jalapeño slice is the signature.
Japadog
A hot dog with Japanese dressings: nori, bonito flakes, teriyaki, daikon. It started as a street cart at Burrard and Smithe in 2005, forced into hot dogs because they were the only food the city’s street-vending bylaws then allowed.
Cantonese dim sum
Some of the best outside Hong Kong, and mostly not downtown: the strongest rooms are along No. 3 Road in Richmond and the Cambie corridor. Go before noon, and order the har gow to judge the kitchen.
Dungeness crab
Pulled from the tanks live in Chinatown and Richmond and cooked ginger-and-scallion or salt-and-pepper. The season runs most of the year, and the crab is sold by weight, so agree the size before it goes to the kitchen.
The California roll
An inside-out roll of crab and avocado, with the seaweed hidden, invented in Vancouver by Hidekazu Tojo for customers who would not eat nori or raw fish. Eat the original at his counter on West Broadway.
Nanaimo bar
British Columbia’s contribution to dessert, named for the Vancouver Island town and printed in local cookbooks by the early 1950s: a crumb-and-coconut base, yellow custard, chocolate on top. Sold in every bakery and best cold.
Vancouver fact sheet
Vancouver at a glance
The essentials worth knowing before you go.
Country
Canada
Region
British Columbia · Metro Vancouver
Population
662,248 in the city (2021 census) · about 2.64M in the metropolitan area
Founded
Incorporated 6 April 1886, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations
Nickname
Terminal City · Raincouver · Hollywood North
Language
English · Cantonese, Mandarin and Punjabi widely spoken
The Great Vancouver Fire destroyed the city on 13 June 1886, ten weeks after it was incorporated. Rebuilding began within days, which is why the oldest buildings in Gastown date from the late 1880s and 1890s rather than earlier.
A freeway through the downtown core was defeated in the late 1960s by a coalition of residents, Chinatown groups and planners. Vancouver is the only major city in North America with no freeway running into its centre, and the waterfront it saved is now the seawall.
Expo 86 ran on the north shore of False Creek from 2 May to 13 October 1986. Two things outlived it: the geodesic dome that became Science World, and the SkyTrain line built to carry visitors, which is still the Expo Line.
Vancouver is the third-largest film and television production centre in North America, which is where the nickname Hollywood North comes from and why a downtown street is periodically dressed as somewhere in the United States.
The Lions Gate Bridge over the First Narrows was privately financed by the Guinness family to open their British Properties land in West Vancouver, and carried its first cars in November 1938. It is now a National Historic Site.
Canada 
