Vancouver travel guide

Top 10 sights in Vancouver

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© squeakymarmot · CC BY 2.0

   Stanley Park

   A 405-hectare park filling the northwestern half of the downtown peninsula, most of it left as the coastal rainforest that was logged here in the 1860s rather than landscaped. The 8.8-kilometre seawall runs right around it, one way for cyclists, and a stand of Kwakwaka'wakw totem poles is at Brockton Point.

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   Vancouver Art Gallery

   Western Canada's largest art museum by floor area, filling 15,300 square metres of the old provincial courthouse beside Robson Square. Francis Rattenbury designed the building; the gallery opened in 1931 elsewhere and moved in during the early 1980s, after the courthouse became a national historic site.

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   3© Jennie Robinson · CC BY 2.0

   Gastown

   The original settlement of 1867, named after a saloon keeper called Gassy Jack, and a national historic site since 2009. Its steam clock of 1977 is powered by the downtown steam heating loop and whistles every quarter hour.

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   4© Socceronly · CC BY-SA 3.0

   West End

   The dense residential quarter between downtown and Stanley Park, where 45,000 people live in a few square kilometres of 1960s towers and surviving Edwardian houses. Denman and Davie streets are the eating and nightlife strips, and English Bay beach is at the end of both.

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   5© Rr parker · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Museum of Anthropology at UBC

   A museum in an Arthur Erickson building of 1976 whose post-and-beam concrete frame echoes Northwest Coast longhouses, with the Great Hall glazed to the water. Bill Reid's yellow cedar Raven and the First Men is here, along with Haida poles saved from abandoned villages.

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   6© No machine-readable author provided. Bobanny assumed (based on copyright claims) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Downtown Vancouver

   The city centre on the Burrard Peninsula, filling the north shore of False Creek and reaching out to the peninsula that holds the West End and Stanley Park. Its stand of residential towers, most of them built since the 1990s, makes it one of the densest districts in Canada.

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   7© Craig Nagy from Vancouver, Canada · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Queen Elizabeth Park

   A park on the highest ground in Vancouver, 152 metres up, made from two exhausted basalt quarries planted as sunken gardens. The lookout takes in the whole city with the North Shore mountains behind, which is why so many wedding parties queue for it.

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   Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary, Vancouver

   The Catholic cathedral at Richards and Dunsmuir, built from 1899 in French Gothic Revival with twin unequal spires and twenty-one stained glass windows. It has served the archdiocese since 1916 and is one of very few nineteenth-century buildings left downtown.

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   9© User:Flying Penguin · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Kitsilano

   The neighbourhood on the south shore of English Bay, named after Squamish chief Xats'alanexw, and the city's counterculture district in the 1970s — Greenpeace was founded from a house here in 1971. Fourth Avenue is now yoga studios and brunch, with the beach two blocks north.

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10. 

    10© Emancipator at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Vancouver Aquarium

    Canada's largest aquarium, opened in Stanley Park in 1956, and a rescue operation as much as a display — its marine mammal centre treats stranded sea otters and seals for release. It stopped keeping cetaceans after a 2017 city bylaw.

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Popular tickets & tours in Vancouver

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Based on 2025 Wikipedia pageviews — popular places beyond the top 10.

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   Downtown Eastside

   One of Vancouver's oldest quarters and, around 1900, its commercial and civic centre before downtown shifted west. An influx of hard drugs and the end of federal social-housing money brought steep decline in the 1980s; by 1997 an epidemic of HIV and overdoses had forced the city to declare a public health emergency.

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   2© Differense · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Science World

   A science centre in the geodesic dome built as the Expo 86 pavilion, its 766 triangles lit at night on the False Creek shore. Inside are hands-on galleries and an OMNIMAX screen twenty-seven metres across.

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   3© Bartbraun (talk) (Uploads) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Wreck Beach

   A clothing-optional beach below the cliffs of Pacific Spirit Park, reached by nearly five hundred wooden steps down from the university campus. It runs 6.7 kilometres, has been used this way since the 1960s, and vendors walk the sand selling food and beer.

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   4© MRDXII · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Chinatown

   The largest Chinatown in Canada, settled from the 1880s by men who built the Canadian Pacific Railway and then paid a head tax to stay. The Sam Kee Building on Pender Street is 1.5 metres deep, the narrowest commercial building in the world.

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   Japantown

   An old neighbourhood east of Gastown and north of Chinatown in Vancouver. Japanese immigrants once made it their own, but that character vanished when Japanese Canadians had their property seized and were sent to internment camps during the Second World War.

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   6© UBCRobs · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Robson Square

   A three-block civic complex by Arthur Erickson, opened in 1983, with the law courts under a sloping glass roof and the plaza sunk below street level. The old 1906 courthouse at its north end is now the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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   7© Stan Shebs · CC BY-SA 3.0

   VanDusen Botanical Garden

   A 22-hectare garden opened in 1975 on a former golf course, with a hedge maze of a thousand pyramid cedars and one of the widest plant collections in Canada. The Festival of Lights strings a million bulbs through it in December.

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   8© dronepicr · CC BY 2.0

   Kitsilano Beach

   The beach at the north end of Kitsilano, facing English Bay with the downtown towers across the water. Beside it is Canada's longest pool, 137 metres of heated saltwater, open from late May to September.

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   Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden

   The first Ming-style scholar's garden built outside China, completed in 1986 by fifty-two artisans from Suzhou using traditional materials and no power tools or screws. Nothing in it is symmetrical, and the walls cut off the noise of Chinatown completely.

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    10© InverseHypercube · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Khalsa Diwan Society Vancouver

    A Sikh society founded in 1906, the oldest in Greater Vancouver, whose first gurdwara on West 2nd Avenue was the largest in North America. It organised support for the passengers of the Komagata Maru, turned away from this harbour in 1914.

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