A city of mild weather, revered history and flowers everywhere, the capital of British Columbia is a genteel stop for tourists.
By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published June 6, 2004
[Times photos: Robert N. Jenkins]
All manner of creatures like to relax by a pond in 175-acre Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, British Columbia.
ABOVE: A guitarist entertains visitors to Bastion Square in Victoria.
The noise from the floatplane's single engine makes conversation difficult among the 14 passengers, so mostly they watch the opposite sides of Vancouver disappear beneath the wings after takeoff.
As the 1950s-era plane becomes airborne, Vancouver's impossibly lush Stanley Park fills the windows. But as the plane turns southeast, trees disappear, and the city's glass-walled skyscrapers threaten to march into the Strait of Georgia and maybe on to the Pacific.
Within minutes, the city is gone, and the water a few hundred feet below is dotted with islands where trees hug small mountains and fields of crops cover cleared ground.
On one side of the plane, the islands are Canadian; on the other, and a few miles away, is the outer necklace of islands belonging to Washington state.
About 30 minutes after takeoff, the floatplane descends toward Vancouver Island, the largest island off North America's Pacific coast, and the orderly street grid of Victoria. After spending a few days in coffee-shop-on-every-block Vancouver, stepping ashore in Victoria is almost culture shock.
Victoria is roughly 110 miles from Vancouver, and that distance buffers Victoria from the corporate mentality and rehab/gentrify surge that has forced most of Vancouver's 1.5-million residents to look for affordable housing in its suburbs.
"Vancouver is where we work and play. Victoria is where your granny lives," snipped a 30-something shopping Vancouver's Urban Fare grocery (it sells loaves of Paris-baked bread for $100).
Ignore that attitude and you will find Victoria charmingly genteel. With its copper-roofed government buildings bordering the Inner Harbor, afternoon tea at the famed Fairmont Empress hotel, double-decker buses and hundreds of lamppost flowerpots, it is said to be the most British-feeling city in Canada.
But the horse carriages meandering along the waterfront are more for tourists than locals. The provincial capital of British Columbia, Victoria boasts the province's major museum, one end of a 32-mile biking-walking trail along the coast, an IMAX theater and a thriving brew pub competition.
Take time to count the roses
Over the course of a year, festivals are held focusing on the migration of the Pacific gray whales, film, literature, dance and music, wine and yacht racing.
Residents even take a week in February to waddle through their yards counting flowers; last year they reported more than 3.4-billion blooms.
Founded in 1843 by the Hudson's Bay Co. as a fur trading outpost, Victoria became a real town 15 years later when an estimated 25,000 prospectors passed through in a gold rush. Now it has more than 74,000 residents, with a quarter-million more in its suburbs. Most of them work in government or tourism jobs.
Victoria celebrates its history. Dozens of handsome, three-story buildings offer brick facades and bay windows to the commercial streets stretching from the downtown waterfront. A blocklong alley has plaques at each end recounting which pioneer family owned businesses along it during the gold rush.
Bastion Square, site of the original Fort Victoria, is a small, tiered plaza of restaurants, artist galleries and boutiques, and the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, recounting the island's dependence on the sea.
On a grander scale, a popular tourist attraction a few minutes from downtown is Craigdarroch Castle Historic House Museum, a 20,000-square-foot mansion built in the 1890s by a rich coal merchant.
Of totem poles and Tut Ale
Victoria is eminently walkable. The multiblock Old Town area, with its antiques shops and eclectic mix of stores, is about four blocks from the harbor in one direction and a similar distance from the five-block Chinatown, said to be the oldest in Canada.
Less than a half-mile from Bastion Square is the Royal BC Museum, one of the premier natural and cultural history museums in North America.
Founded in 1886, the museum settled in its present building in 1968, though it has been enlarged and the National Geographic IMAX Theater was added.
The Royal BC divides its permanent exhibits into three categories; each is imaginatively presented.
The Natural History area goes beyond realistic dioramas; the mockup of an old-growth forest is eye-catching. It is filled with specimens of coastal and inland animals living in the province, but it also displays a woolly mammoth, a re-creation of the creatures that died out about 13,000 years ago.
One floor up, the museum presents the province's human history, divided into that of the original inhabitants - Canadians refer to these tribes as the First People - and to the later settlers of European descent.
Artifacts in the First People's hall, such as jade and wood tools and bowls, date back 3,200 years. There are two major themes: the differences between coastal and inland peoples, and how the arrival of the whites - with their firearms, flour, woolen blankets, beads and buttons - changed the natives' way of life forever.
The First People's stories are offered with such reverence that it is the only place in the museum where visitors may not photograph artifacts. One multistory room is filled with totem poles; the images are of humans, ravens, eagles, whales and spirits.
In a darkened gallery, spotlights alternately shine on ritual dance masks as recordings by Canadian Indians recite the legends around each mask.
Photographs, some of them wall-sized, reveal how the First People and the white settlers coexisted more than 100 years ago.
The story of the whites is presented in the Modern History Gallery.
This area includes a full-scale model of the captain's cabin of the HMS Discovery. This was the three-masted ship captained by George Vancouver that first charted the area in 1789-90.
A mock village recreates British Columbia life before the 20th century, with a street of storefronts, a logging and sawmill operation, and a mock mine.
Farther along, Century Hall has artifacts from throughout the 20th century. Touch screens let visitors read newspaper pages from various decades. Just behind the visitors, cases hold items including a 1921 radio, a "riot stick" used against jobless protesters who had occupied a post office in 1938, and posters for pop stars Alanis Morissette and Bryan Adams.
The museum is installing what spokesman Chris Higgins says will be "our most prestigious exhibit ever," 144 Egyptian artifacts on loan from the British Museum.
Covering 3,000 years of history, "Eternal Egypt" will be on display from July 10 through Oct. 31. It will have taken the Royal BC more than nine months to create the display areas, Higgins said.
Hoping to cash in on the exhibit, six city restaurants plan to add Egyptian items to their menus, and one of the several downtown pubs is even using a 2,000-year-old recipe to brew what it's calling Tut Ale.
Out the back door of the museum is the vest-pocket Thunderbird Park, the site of several totem poles. First Nation carvers work there making poles in the summer.
Two blocks farther up the hill is an urban treasure, even for this pretty city.
Beacon Hill Park is 175 acres of grass, flowers, trees, trails, a petting zoo and creeks lined by weeping willows. The park is gracious, as are the ducks, geese and bushy-tailed squirrels that wander up to folks, looking for a handout.
Because of Victoria's mild climate - temperatures reach the mid 40s in January, the mid 70s in August - the city boasts flowers almost year-round. In Beacon Hill, this means azaleas, roses, daffodils, tulips and gladiolas stand out against the background of dogwoods, evergreens and other trees.
All through the park, people push strollers, ride mountain bikes, have picnics and read by the lazy waters.
Like Victoria itself, it is a time-forgotten place.
If you go
GETTING THERE: There is connecting air service from the Tampa Bay area to Seattle and Vancouver. Both cities have floatplane and helicopter service to Victoria, which has an airport as well as the floatplane base in the Inner Harbor.
Car and passenger ferries, and high-speed, passenger-only catamarans also travel to Victoria from Vancouver and Seattle. For more information, go to tourismvictoria.com and click on "Getting to Victoria."
THE MUSEUM: The Royal BC Museum and the IMAX theater are open daily except for Christmas and New Year's days. Admission prices are age 19 and older $11 Canadian about $8.25 U.S., 65 and older and 6 to 18 years $7.70 Canadian about $5.77 U.S.. For more information, go to www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca
FOR MORE INFORMATION: For maps and pictures of the city and Vancouver Island, event calendars, lists of accommodations and more, contact the Greater Victoria Visitors and Convention Bureau. (250) 414-6999; tourismvictoria.com; e-mail info@tourismvictoria.com
ABOVE: A guitarist entertains visitors to Bastion Square in Victoria.