North America
Vancouver
Mountains, ocean, and rainforest within the city limits — Canada's most naturally spectacular metropolis
Mountains & Sea
Ski in the morning, kayak in the afternoon — the geography here is genuinely extraordinary.
Stanley Park
A thousand-acre rainforest park on a peninsula surrounded by the Pacific.
Pacific Rim Food
Outstanding Japanese, Chinese, and Korean food shaped by decades of Pacific immigration.
Vancouver has a geographic situation that few cities in the world can match. The mountains of the Coast Range rise directly behind the downtown skyline, close enough that their snow cover is visible from the street on a clear day. The Pacific — technically the Strait of Georgia, though the feeling is entirely oceanic — lies in front. Between the two, the city occupies a series of peninsulas and bridges, and the result is that almost wherever you are in Vancouver, you are aware of the landscape surrounding it. This is not incidental to the experience of the place; it defines it.
Stanley Park, a thousand-acre peninsula of old-growth Douglas fir and cedar on the edge of downtown, is one of the great urban parks in the world. The seawall path that circles it offers uninterrupted views across the water to the North Shore mountains, and the interior trails move through a forest that feels genuinely wild despite the city that encircles it. The park also contains Brockton Point, where a collection of totem poles represents some of the Indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest — a brief but worthwhile introduction to the cultures that inhabited this coast long before the city existed.
Granville Island, under the south end of the Granville Bridge, houses a covered public market that is among the best in Canada — fresh Pacific salmon, locally baked bread, and produce from the Fraser Valley, alongside craft studios and a thriving theatre scene. The neighbourhoods of Kitsilano and Commercial Drive each have distinct characters worth an afternoon. And for those willing to travel an hour north by road or SeaBus, the sea-to-summit gondola at Squamish — with its suspension bridge through the forest canopy — offers the kind of access to wilderness that would be a major destination anywhere else in the world.