Canada Guide
Vancouver Island
Beacon Hill Park
The best park within walking distance of the town centre is Beacon Hill Park, south of the Inner Harbour and a few minutes' walk up the road behind the museum. Victoria is sometimes known as the "City of Gardens", and at the right times of the year this park shows why. Victoria's biggest green space, it has lots of paths, ponds, big trees and quiet corners, and plenty of views over the Juan de Fuca Strait to the distant Olympic Mountains of Washington State (especially on the park's southern side).
The gardens in the park are by turns well tended and wonderfully wild and unkemp. They claim the world's tallest totem pole, as well as the "Mile Zero" marker of the Trans-Canada Hwy and – that ultimate emblem of Englishness – a cricket pitch. Some of the trees are massive old-growth timbers that you'd normally only see on the island's unlogged west coast. Come here in spring and you'll catch swaths of daffodils and blue camas flowers, the latter a floral monument to Victoria's earliest aboriginal inhabitants, who cultivated the flower for its edible bulb. Some 30,000 other flowers are planted in the gardens annually.