Halifax travel guide

Top 10 sights in Halifax

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© baekken · CC BY 2.0

   St. Mary's Basilica

   The Catholic cathedral of Halifax, built from 1820 and given a granite spire of about sixty metres in 1874 — said to be the tallest polished granite spire in North America. Its windows were blown in by the 1917 explosion.

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2. 

   2© Thparkth · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Georges Island

   A drumlin island in the middle of Halifax Harbour, fortified from 1750 and rebuilt as Fort Charlotte, with a system of 1860s tunnels linking its gun positions. It was closed to the public for decades and reopened by ferry in 2020.

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3. 

   3© Skeezix1000 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

   The provincial gallery of Nova Scotia, in Halifax. Its best-known holding is the one-room house of the folk painter Maud Lewis, moved inside the building with every surface she painted intact.

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   HMCS Sackville

   The last of 269 Flower-class corvettes, built in 1941, the small escorts that took the Atlantic convoys through the U-boat war at appalling discomfort to their crews. She is moored in Halifax as Canada's naval memorial, restored to her 1944 condition.

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5. 

   5© Lachoneus · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Halifax Nova Scotia Temple

   A Latter-day Saints temple at Dartmouth across the harbour from Halifax, dedicated in November 1999, and the only one in Atlantic Canada. Only members in good standing enter beyond the lobby.

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6. 

   6© Letterofmarque · CC BY 3.0

   Maritime Museum of the Atlantic

   A museum on the Halifax waterfront with one of the largest Titanic collections anywhere — the ships that recovered the dead sailed from this harbour — and a full account of the 1917 explosion that flattened the north end of the city.

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7. 

   7© Moneywagon · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Citadel Hill

   Four forts have crowned this hill since the British founded Halifax in 1749; the third, built between 1794 and 1800, took the name Fort George after George III. The present star-shaped citadel was never attacked, and levelling for it lowered the summit by a dozen metres.

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8. 

   8© – Wladyslaw [Disk.] · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Paul's Church

   An Anglican church of 1750, the oldest Protestant place of worship in Canada and the oldest building in Halifax, built to a London design and framed in Boston. A piece of window frame from the 1917 explosion is still embedded in the wall above the door.

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9. 

   9© Aconcagua (talk) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Halifax Town Clock

   A three-tiered clock tower on the slope of Citadel Hill, ordered by Prince Edward — Queen Victoria's father — who commanded the garrison and was obsessed with punctuality. It began keeping time in 1803 and its original mechanism still runs.

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10. 

    10© Hantsheroes · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Halifax Public Gardens

    Victorian public gardens formally established in 1867, the year of Confederation, and among the few nineteenth-century public gardens in North America surviving largely intact. Hurricane Juan destroyed about seventy trees in 2003; the 1887 bandstand survived.

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1. 

   1© Letterofmarque · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Africville

   A community of African Nova Scotians on the shore of Bedford Basin from the early 1800s, denied water, sewers and paved roads while the city put a prison and a dump beside it. Halifax demolished it in the 1960s under urban renewal, apologised in 2010, and the land is now a park with a rebuilt church.

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2. 

   2© Skeezix1000 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21

   Canada's national immigration museum, in the shed at Pier 21 through which about a million immigrants entered between 1928 and 1971, along with half a million troops leaving for the war. Visitors can search the arrival records on site.

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3. 

   3© Verne Equinox · CC BY 3.0

   Shubie Park

   A sixteen-hectare park in Dartmouth around the locks of the Shubenacadie Canal, dug from 1826 to link Halifax Harbour with the Bay of Fundy and abandoned unfinished. Trails follow the canal bed along Lake Charles.

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4. 

   4© Original uploader was Verne Equinox at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Hydrostone

   A district in the North End built between 1918 and 1921 for families made homeless by the Halifax Explosion, of terraces in concrete block — the hydrostone the name refers to. It followed British garden city principles and is a National Historic Site.

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5. 

   5© Tim Bryson · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Welsford-Parker Monument

   A triumphal arch of 1860 in the Old Burying Ground, honouring Major Augustus Welsford and Captain William Parker of Nova Scotia, both killed at the storming of Sebastopol in 1855. It is the oldest Crimean War monument in North America and the only war memorial from before Confederation.

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6. 

   6© Dan Conlin · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Naval Museum of Halifax

   A naval museum at CFB Halifax in Admiralty House, the 1819 residence of the Royal Navy's North America station commander. It covers the Royal Canadian Navy from 1910 and the Atlantic convoy war, and holds the navy's ship badge collection.

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7. 

   7© Saffron Blaze · CC BY-SA 3.0

   York Redoubt

   A redoubt of 1793 on a bluff at Ferguson's Cove above the harbour mouth, extended through the nineteenth century with muzzle-loading rifles and again in both world wars, when it controlled the anti-submarine net across the entrance. It is a National Historic Site.

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8. 

   8© See More · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Long Lake Provincial Park

   Some 2,095 hectares of former watershed land inside Halifax, released when the city's water supply moved to Pockwock Lake and set aside as a park in 1984. The Chain Lakes at its edge are still held in reserve as the city's emergency supply.

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9. 

   9© Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Prince of Wales Tower

   A martello tower of 1796 in Point Pleasant Park, built on Prince Edward's orders and the oldest in North America. Its walls are up to four metres thick at the base, designed to absorb naval gunfire rather than deflect it.

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10. 

    10© Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0

    Little Dutch (Deutsch) Church

    A small wooden church of 1756 built by German-speaking settlers, and the second oldest building in Halifax after St Paul's. It began as a house and was converted; the graveyard around it holds those first Lutheran families, and it is a National Historic Site.

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