Vancouver Guide
The City
Stanley Park
One of the world's finest urban spaces, Stanley Park crowns the tip of the Downtown peninsula. It is a huge green heart of woodland, temperate rainforest, marshes, beaches and untamed landscapes that provides a link to the not-so-distant days when Vancouver was little more than a clearing in the west-coast wilderness. At 988 acres, it's one of the largest urban parks in North America – some twenty percent larger than New York's Central Park. And, unlike many urban parks, it's generally very safe, though there have been homophobic attacks on gays in some areas at night. Only the outer edge is developed for recreational use. Much of the park's interior, by contrast, is nearly impenetrable scrub and forest that, while home to lots of wildlife – including herons, coyotes, eagles, owls and more – is visited by relatively few people and crisscrossed by just a handful of trails (most of them well-maintained gravel paths).
Ocean surrounds the park on three sides, ensuring some superb views from the road (Stanley Park Drive) and the deservedly popular 10.5km cycleway and pedestrian Seawall Promenade that trace its perimeter. Also around the fringes – and particularly along the park's southern edge, the area closest to Downtown – are plenty of more conventional urban park trappings: lawns, flowerbeds, rose gardens, tennis courts, children's playgrounds, a miniature railway, pitch-and-putt golf and lots of open, wooded or flower-decorated spaces where you can picnic, snooze or watch the world go by.
Best of all, the park has three good beaches: English Bay Beach, ranged along Beach Avenue; Second Beach, to the north, which also features a shallow onshore swimming pool; and Third Beach, further north still, the least crowded of the three and the one with the best views of West Vancouver and the mountains. English Bay, at the southern end of Denman Street, is the most readily accessible from Downtown and is particularly easy to visit after seeing the park. Away from the park's natural delights, the main attraction is the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre, Canada's largest aquarium.