Vancouver Travel Guide

If you really want to understand Vancouver, stand at the edge of the Inner Harbour (the Canada Place cruise-ship terminal makes a good vantage point) and look around you. To the west you'll see Stanley Park, one of the world's largest urban parks, jutting out into the waters of Burrard Inlet. To the north, just across the inlet, rise snowcapped mountains. To the east, right along the water, is the low-rise brick-faced Old Town. And almost everything else you see lining the water's edge will be new glass-and-steel high-rise towers. As giant cruise ships glide in to berth, floatplanes buzz in and out, and your ears catch a medley of foreign tongues, you may wonder just where on earth you are. Vancouver is majestic and intimate, sophisticated and completely laid-back, a bustling, prosperous city that somehow, almost miraculously, manages to combine its contemporary, urban-centered consciousness with the free-spirited magnificence of nature on a grand scale.

Vancouver is probably one of the "newest" cities you'll ever visit, and certainly it's one of the most cosmopolitan. A youthfulness pervades, along with a certain Pacific Northwest chic (and cheek) that comes from being the backdrop in so many movies that Vancouver is sometimes called "Hollywood North" (as is Toronto, so maybe it's time to retire that rather tired phrase). I can guarantee you that part of your trip will be spent trying to figure out what makes it so unique. Nature figures big in that equation, but so does enlightened city planning and the diversity of cultures. Vancouver is a place where people want to live. It's a place that awakens dreams and desires.

The city's history is in its topography. Thousands of years ago, a giant glacier sliced along the foot of the coast range, carving out a deep trench and piling up a gigantic moraine of rock and sand. When the ice retreated, water from the Pacific flowed in and the moraine became a peninsula, flanked on one side by a deep natural harbor (today's Port of Vancouver on Burrard Inlet) and on the other by a river of glacial meltwater (today called the Fraser River). Vast forests of fir and cedar covered the land and wildlife flourished. The First Nations tribes that settled in the area developed rich cultures based on cedar and salmon.

Some 10,000 years later, a surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) came by, took in the peninsula, the harbor, and the river, and decided he'd found the perfect spot for the CPR's new Pacific terminus. He kept it quiet, as smart railway men tended to do, until the company had bought up most of the land around town. In 1887 the railway moved in, set up shop, and the city of Vancouver was born.

Vancouverites have seemingly all fallen in love with the outdoors. And why shouldn't they? Every terrain needed for every kind of outdoor pursuit -- hiking, in-line skating, mountainbiking, downhill and cross-country skiing, kayaking, windsurfing, rock climbing, parasailing, snowboarding -- is right in their backyard: ocean, rivers, mountains, islands, sidewalks. The international resort town of Whistler, which will take center stage during the Winter Olympics in 2010, is just 2 hours north of downtown Vancouver.

When they're not skiing or kayaking, Vancouverites enjoy the best of their city's culinary offerings. In the past decade or so, Vancouver has become one of the top dining destinations in the world, bursting with an incredible variety of cuisines and making an international name for itself with its Pacific Northwest cooking. The new food mantra here is "buy locally, eat seasonally," which you'll find being practiced at many restaurants.

The rest of the world has taken notice of the blessed life people in these parts lead. Surveys generally list Vancouver as one of the 10 best cities in the world to live in. It's also one of the 10 best to visit, according to Condé Nast Traveler, and won that magazine's Readers' Choice Award in 2005 and 2006 as "Best City in the Americas." In 2003, the International Olympic Committee named Vancouver the host of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Heady stuff, particularly for a spot that less than 20 years ago was routinely derided as the world's biggest mill town.

Though some "heritage buildings" still remain in Vancouver, the face of the city you see today is undeniably new. Starting in the 1960s, misguided planners and developers seemed intent on demolishing every last vestige of the city's pioneer past, replacing old brick and wood buildings with an array of undistinguished concrete high-rises and blocky eyesores. Citizen outcry finally got the bulldozers to stop their rampage. Luckily, landscaping and gardening was an ingrained part of life in this mild climate, so plants, trees, and shrubs were not uprooted for endless parking lots. You may be amazed, in fact, by the amount of green, the number of fountains, and the overall lushness of neighborhoods like the West End, which also happens to be one of the most densely populated areas in the world. A building boom preceded Expo '86 (the last world's fair in North America) and followed it as well, spurred on by enormous amounts of cash pouring in from Hong Kong and Asia. The new residential towers, made of glass and steel, are much lighter looking than those from times past, and keep with the hip, international image that Vancouver is developing for itself.