Canada Guide
Vancouver Island
Victoria
VICTORIA is a popular excursion from Vancouver, and though it's possible to come here for the day – especially if you take a seaplane from Vancouver's harbour – you'd be better advised to stay overnight and give the city the two or so days it deserves.
This said, 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. It's not named after a queen and an era for nothing. Much of the waterfront area has an undeniably quaint and likeable English feel – "Brighton Pavilion with the Himalayas for a backdrop," said the writer Rudyard Kipling – and Victoria has more British-born residents than anywhere in Canada. However, its tourist potential is exploited chiefly for American visitors, served up with lashings of fake Victoriana and chintzy commercialism, and ersatz echoes of empire at every turn. 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 also provides plenty of pubs, restaurants (and the odd club) and serves as a base for a range of outdoor activities and slightly more far-flung attractions. Chief of these is whale-watching, with a plethora of companies on hand to take you out to the teeming waters around the city. And as a final lure the weather here – though often damp – 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.
Butchart Gardens
Address: 800 Benvenuto Ave, Brentwood Bay on Hwy 17 towards the Swartz Bay ferry terminal
Opening time: Daily: mid-June– Aug 9am–10.30pm, first two weeks of Sept & Dec 9am–9pm; rest of the year 9am– sunset
Price: $13–23
Telephone: 250/652-4422
Website: www.butchartgardens.com
If you're into things horticultural you'll want to make a trek out to the celebrated and much-hyped Butchart Gardens, 22km north of Victoria. The gardens are renowned among visitors and locals alike for the stunning firework displays that usually take place each Sat evening in July and Aug. There is also a restaurant and various other commercial enterprises, with musical entertainment well to the fore. The gardens are also illuminated during the late-evening opening hours between mid-June and the end of Sept.
The gardens were started in 1904 by Jenny Butchart, wife of a mine-owner and pioneer of Portland Cement in Canada and the US, her initial aim being to landscape one of her husband's quarries. The garden now covers fifty breathtaking acres, comprising rose, Japanese and Italian gardens and lots of decorative details. About half a million visitors a year tramp through the foliage, which includes over a million plants and seven hundred different species. At the same time, the amount of space actually given over to gardens may strike you as slightly disproportionate to the space allotted to the car park, gift shop and restaurant.
To get here by public transport take bus #75 for "Central Saanich" from downtown. Otherwise, there are regular summer shuttles (May– Oct daily, hourly in the morning, half-hourly in the afternoon) from the main bus terminal, where tickets ($4) are obtainable not from the main ticket office but a separate Gray Lines desk.
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