Victoria travel guide

Top 10 sights in Victoria

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Marcus · CC BY-SA 1.0

   Butchart Gardens

   Twenty-two hectares of gardens begun in 1904 in an exhausted limestone quarry by Jennie Butchart, whose husband owned the cement works. Over a million people a year come; the Sunken Garden is the quarry floor, and the fireworks run on summer Saturdays.

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2. 

   2© Original uploader was Drhaggis at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Andrew's Cathedral

   The Catholic cathedral of Victoria, built in the 1890s in high Victorian Gothic of brick and stone, with carved cedar and stained glass inside. It stands a few blocks from the harbour.

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3. 

   3© Michal Klajban · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Royal British Columbia Museum

   The provincial museum, founded in 1886, whose First Peoples gallery held one of the finest Northwest Coast collections anywhere until it was closed in 2021 for repatriation work. The reconstructed 1900s street and the woolly mammoth remain the most loved exhibits.

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   Beacon Hill Park

   A 75-hectare park south of downtown, laid out in 1882 and one of the oldest in western Canada, running down to the Juan de Fuca Strait. Its flagpole, at 39 metres, was cut from a single Douglas fir and is among the tallest free-standing poles in the world.

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5. 

   5© Ken Walker kgw@lunar.ca · CC BY 2.5

   Brentwood Bay

   A village on the Saanich Peninsula, the landing for Butchart Gardens and the terminus of the ferry across Saanich Inlet to Mill Bay. Boats tie up at the small marina, and the gardens are a ten-minute walk from the dock.

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6. 

   6© Storeswallah at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Fort Rodd Hill National Historic Site

   A coastal battery of the 1890s on Esquimalt Harbour, built to defend the Royal Navy's Pacific base, with three gun positions, magazines and searchlight emplacements intact. Fisgard Lighthouse of 1860, the first on Canada's west coast, stands on the point beside it.

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7. 

   7© The original uploader was IDuke at English Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt

   The Royal Canadian Navy's Pacific base, on the harbour west of Victoria, where the Royal Navy stationed its squadron from 1865 before handing over in 1905. It is the region's largest employer, with a graving dock and a naval museum open to the public.

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8. 

   8© Redonebird · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Goldstream Provincial Park

   A provincial park in a canyon northwest of Victoria with Douglas firs over six hundred years old and a 47-metre waterfall. Chum salmon run up the Goldstream in November and December, and bald eagles gather in numbers to feed on them.

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   Fort Victoria

   The Hudson's Bay Company post founded in 1843 that became Victoria, and the company's Pacific headquarters after the Oregon boundary put Fort Vancouver in American territory. It was demolished by 1864; brick outlines in the pavement of Bastion Square mark the walls.

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10. 

    10© HighInBC Attribute to Ryan Bushby · CC BY-SA 2.5

    Thunderbird Park

    An open-air park beside the Royal BC Museum holding totem poles and a Kwakwaka'wakw big house, most of them carved on site from the 1950s by Mungo Martin and later Haida and Gitxsan artists. The originals they replaced are in the museum.

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Popular tickets & tours in Victoria

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

1. 

   1© Michal Klajban · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Chinatown

   The oldest Chinatown in Canada, settled from 1858 by miners heading to the Fraser gold rush, and second in North America only to San Francisco's. Fan Tan Alley, ninety centimetres wide at its narrowest, was the way into the gambling and opium houses.

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   Christ Church Cathedral

   The Anglican cathedral of the Diocese of British Columbia, begun in 1929 in Gothic Revival and still not finished — the towers were completed in the 1990s. It is one of the largest churches in Canada, with a peal of thirteen bells.

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   Pacific Undersea Gardens

   A floating aquarium in the Inner Harbour from 1964 to 2013, whose visitors walked down into a submerged chamber to look out at the natural seabed rather than into tanks. It was towed away and scrapped after closing.

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4. 

   4© Joe Mabel (on Flickr as Joe Mabel from Seattle, US) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

   A public gallery opened in 1951 in the Spencer mansion on Moss Street, holding the largest public collection of Emily Carr's work and a notable Japanese collection with a Shinto shrine in the grounds. Its annual Moss Street Paint-In closes the road each July.

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   5

   Lime Kiln Point State Park

   A seventeen-hectare Washington state park on the west shore of San Juan Island, reckoned the best place in the world to watch orcas from dry land. Southern resident pods pass close to the point in summer chasing salmon, and the 1919 lighthouse is a research station.

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6. 

   6© Andy Smith from Victoria, BC, Canada · CC BY 2.0

   Elk/Beaver Lake Regional Park

   A 434-hectare regional park north of Victoria around two joined lakes, with a rowing course that has held world championship trials. A ten-kilometre trail circles the water, and the beaches are the closest freshwater swimming to the city.

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   Helmcken House

   A log house of 1852 in Thunderbird Park, among the oldest surviving houses in British Columbia, built by the Hudson's Bay Company's surgeon John Sebastian Helmcken. His medical instruments and the family's furniture are still in the rooms.

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   Discovery Island Marine Provincial Park

   A marine park on an island 3.7 kilometres east of Oak Bay, reachable only by kayak or small boat across a strait with strong tidal current. Harbour seals, otters and seabirds breed on it, and Songhees reserve land occupies part of the island.

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9. 

   9© Brandon Godfrey from Victoria B.C, Canada · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Island View Beach

   A beach on the east side of the Saanich Peninsula backed by dunes and a tidal lagoon, which makes it one of the best migratory bird stops on the island. The Gulf Islands and Mount Baker are in view across Haro Strait.

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10. 

    10© Heather Stone · CC BY-SA 3.0

    University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries

    The University of Victoria's downtown gallery on Yates Street, showing from a teaching collection of about twenty thousand works. Its programme is built around research with Indigenous communities on the objects the university holds.

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