Canada is almost unimaginably vast. It stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the latitude of Rome to beyond the Magnetic North Pole. Its archetypal landscapes are the Rocky Mountain lakes and peaks, the endless forests and the prairie wheatfields, but Canada holds landscapes that defy expectations: rainforest and desert lie close together in the southwest corner of the country, while in the east a short drive can take you from fjords to lush orchards. What's more, great tracts of Canada are completely unspoiled - ninety percent of the country's 28.5 million population lives within 100 miles of the US border.
Like its neighbour to the south, Canada is a spectrum of cultures, a hotchpotch of immigrant groups who supplanted the continent's many native peoples. There's a crucial difference, though. Whereas citizens of the United States are encouraged to perceive themselves as Americans above all else, Canada's concertedly multicultural approach has done more to acknowledge the origins of its people, creating an ethnic mosaic as opposed to America's "melting-pot". Alongside the French and British majorities live a host of communities who maintain the traditions of their homelands - Chinese, Ukrainians, Portuguese, Indians, Dutch, Polish, Greek and Spanish, to name just the most numerous. For the visitor, the mix that results from the country's exemplary tolerance is an exhilarating experience, offering such widely differing environments as Vancouver's huge Chinatown and the austere religious enclaves of Manitoba. Canadians themselves, however, are often troubled by the lack of a clear self-image, tending to emphasize the ways in which they are different from the US as a means of self-description. The question "What is a Canadian?" has acquired a new immediacy with the interminable and acrimonious debate over Québec and its possible secession, but ultimately there can be no simple characterization of a people whose country is not so much a single nation as a committee on a continental scale. Pierre Berton, one of Canada's finest writers, wisely ducked the issue; Canadians, he quipped, are "people who know how to make love in a canoe".
The typical Canadian might be an elusive concept, but you'll find there's a distinctive feel to the country. Some towns might seem a touch too well-regulated and unspontaneous, but against this there's the overwhelming sense of Canadian pride in their history and pleasure in the beauty of their land. Canada embraces its own clichés with an energy that's irresistible, promoting everything from the Calgary Stampede to maple-syrup festivals and lumberjacking contests with an extraordinary zeal and openness. As John Buchan, writer and Governor-General of Canada, said, "You have to know a man awfully well in Canada to know his surname."
|
Major Cities
- Calgary is a likeable and booming place, whose downtown skyscrapers soared almost overnight on the back of an oil bonanza in the 1970s, CALGARY 's tight high-rise core is good for wandering, and contains the prestigious Glenbow Museum . The wooden houses of the far-flung suburbs, meanwhile, recall the city's pioneering frontier origins, which are further celebrated in the annual Calgary Stampede , a hugely popular cowboy carnival in which the whole town - and hordes of tourists - revel in a boots-and-stetson image that's still very much a way of life in the surrounding cattle country. Year-round you can dip into the city's lesser museums and historic sites, or take time out in its scattering of attractive city parks. Hotel Accommodation Calgary Canada
- Alberta's provincial capital, Edmonton is among Canada's most northerly cities, and at times - notably in the teeth of its bitter winters - it can seem a little too far north for comfort. Situated above the waters of the North Saskatchewan River, whose park-filled valley winds below the high-rises of downtown, the city tries hard with its festivals, parks, restaurants and urban-renewal projects. With a downtown area that still has the somewhat unfinished feel of a frontier town, however, it's perhaps appropriate that the premier attraction for the vast majority of visitors is a shopping centre, the infamous West Edmonton Mall . This certainly has curiosity value, but not really enough to merit a special journey here. Downtown has a handful of modest sights, though most enjoyment in the city is to be had in Old Strathcona , a rejuvenated "historic" district south of the North Saskatchewan River filled with heritage buildings, modest museums and plenty of eating and drinking venues. Edmonton lacks the big set-piece museums of Calgary and Vancouver, but its Space and Science Centre is a sight within a whisker of the first rank. Hotel Accommodation Edmonton Canada
- Halifax , set on a steep and spatulate promontory beside one of the world's finest harbours, has become the focal point of the Maritimes, the region's financial, educational and transportation centre, whose metropolitan population of over 500,000 makes it seven times the size of its nearest rival, New Brunswick's Saint John. This pre-eminence has been achieved since World War II, but long before then Halifax was a naval town par excellence , its harbour defining the character and economy of a city which rarely seemed to look inland. Hotel Accommodation Halifax Canada
- Montreal , Canada's second-largest city, is geographically as close to the European coast as to Vancouver, and in look and feel it combines some of the finest aspects of the two continents. Its North American skyline of glass and concrete rises above churches and monuments in a melange of European styles as varied as Montréal's social mix. This is also the second-largest French-speaking metropolis after Paris, but only two-thirds of the city's three and a half million people are of French extraction, the other third being a cosmopolitan mishmash of les autres - including British, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Italians, Greeks, Jews, South Americans and West Indians. The result is a truly multidimensional city, with a global variety of eateries, bars and clubs, matched by a calendar of festivals that makes this the most vibrant place in Canada. Hotel Accommodation Montreal Canada
- The capital of the second biggest country on the planet, Ottawa struggles with its reputation as a bureaucratic labyrinth of little charm and character. The problem is that many Canadians who aren't federal employees - and even some who are - blame the city for all the country's woes. All too aware of this, the Canadian government have spent lashings of dollars to turn Ottawa into "a city of urban grace in which all Canadians can take pride" - so goes the promotional literature, but predictably this very investment is often resented. Furthermore, the hostility is deeply rooted, dating back as far as 1857 when Queen Victoria, inspired by some genteel watercolours, declared Ottawa the capital, leaving Montréal and Toronto smarting at their rebuff. Hotel Accommodation Ottawa Canada
- The economic and cultural focus of English-speaking Canada, Toronto is the country's largest metropolis. It sprawls along the northern shore of Lake Ontario, its vibrant, appealing centre encased by a jangle of satellite townships and industrial zones that cover - as "Greater Toronto" - no less than 100 square kilometres. For decades, Toronto was saddled with unflattering sobriquets - "Toronto the Good", "Hogtown" - that reflected a perhaps deserved reputation for complacent mediocrity and greed. Spurred into years of image-building, the city's postwar administrations have lavished millions of dollars on glitzy architecture, slick museums, an excellent public-transport system, and the reclamation and development of the lakefront. As a result, Toronto has become one of North America's most likeable cities, an eminently liveable place whose citizens keep a wary eye on both their politicians and the developers. Hotel Accommodation Toronto Canada
- Vancouver is not all pleasure, however. Business growth continues apace in Canada's third-largest city, much of its prosperity stemming from a port so laden with the raw materials of the Canadian interior - lumber, wheat and minerals - that it ranks as one of North America's largest ports, handling more dry tonnage than the West Coast ports of Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco and San Diego put together. The port in turn owes its prominence to Vancouver's much-trumpeted position as a gateway to the Far East , and its increasingly pivotal role in the new global market of the Pacific Rim. This lucrative realignment is strengthened by a two-way flow in traffic: in the past decade Vancouver has been inundated with Hong Kong Chinese (the so-called "yacht people"), an influx which has pushed up property prices and slightly strained the city's reputation as an ethnically integrated metropolis.
Hotel Accommodation Vancouver Canada
- Victoria has a lot to live up to. Leading US travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler has voted it one of the world's top-ten cities to visit, and world number one for ambience and environment. And it's not named after a queen and an era for nothing. Victoria has gone to town in serving up lashings of fake Victoriana and chintzy commercialism - tearooms, Union Jacks, bagpipers, pubs and ersatz echoes of empire confront you at every turn. Much of the waterfront area has an undeniably quaint and likeable English feel - "Brighton Pavilion with the Himalayas for a backdrop", as Kipling remarked - and Victoria has more British-born residents than anywhere in Canada, but its tourist potential is exploited chiefly for American visitors who make the short sea journey from across the border. Despite the seasonal influx, and the sometimes atrociously tacky attractions designed to part tourists from their money, it's a small, relaxed and pleasantly sophisticated place, worth lingering in if only for its inspirational museum. It's also rather genteel in parts, something underlined by the number of gardens around the place and some nine hundred hanging baskets that adorn much of the downtown area during the summer. Though often damp, the weather here is extremely mild: Victoria's meteorological station has the distinction of being the only one in Canada to record a winter in which the temperature never fell below freezing.
Hotel Accommodation Victoria Canada
- Winnipeg accounts for roughly two-thirds of the population of Manitoba, and lies at the geographic centre of the country, sandwiched between the American frontier to the south and the infertile Canadian Shield to the north and east. The city has been the gateway to the prairies since 1873, and became the transit point for much of the country's transcontinental traffic when the railroad arrived twelve years later. From the very beginning, Winnipeg was described as the city where "the West began", and its polyglot population, drawn from almost every country in Europe, was attracted by the promise of the fertile soils to the west.
Hotel Accommodation Winnipeg Canada
- View all cities
|