Things to do
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Beacon Hill Park
Garry oaks and camas meadows fill the city's original park, seventy-five hectares sloping to the Strait of Juan de Fuca with the Olympic Mountains across it. Mungo Martin's cedar pole, carved in the nineteen fifties and close to forty metres, stands near the hilltop. A children's farm with goats runs in the warmer months. The Trans-Canada Highway begins at the southwest corner, marked by a cairn.
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British Columbia Parliament Buildings
Francis Rattenbury won the competition to design these in his twenties and finished them in 1897, in grey andesite and slate under a dome carrying a gilded Captain Vancouver. Thousands of bulbs outline the whole front after dark, a lighting scheme kept up since a royal visit. Free guided tours run through the chambers when the legislature is in recess, and the public gallery opens when it sits.
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Butchart Gardens
Begun in 1904 by the wife of a cement manufacturer, who set about planting out his worked-out limestone quarry, and now some twenty hectares of garden at Brentwood Bay, half an hour north of the city. The Sunken Garden fills the quarry floor, with rose, Japanese and Italian gardens around it. Coaches and cruise passengers crowd the paths from late morning. Summer Saturdays end in fireworks over the lawns.
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Royal BC Museum
Belleville Street holds the provincial museum, known for its full-scale reconstructions: a woolly mammoth, a coastal rainforest, a gaslit Victorian street with a working cinema. Totem poles and a big house stand outside in Thunderbird Park. Galleries of First Peoples material have been closed while the museum reworks how that collection is shown. A large-format cinema shares the building. Two hours is a fair minimum for the reconstructions alone.
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Victoria Inner Harbour
Floatplanes land in the middle of the city here, on a working harbour ringed by a stone causeway, with the Empress hotel and the domed legislature above it. Small passenger ferries cross to the docks and, on summer Sunday mornings, perform a water ballet. Buskers, carvers and totem poles line the walk. The American ferry from Port Angeles berths on the south side, customs queue included.