Vancouver

Before it was called Vancouver, this land belonged to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Archaeological evidence shows people have lived in the area for at least 8,000 years. Their villages lined the inlets, and their knowledge of the land shaped the region long before the first European ships arrived.

When Spanish and British explorers arrived in Burrard Inlet in the early 1790s, they encountered Indigenous villages that had already thrived there for generations.

The city’s real boom came in the late 1800s. A sawmill town called Granville was renamed Vancouver in 1886.

Within months, disaster struck. A massive fire destroyed almost the entire settlement. Locals said it burned so hot that glass melted in the streets.

Remarkably, the city began rebuilding within weeks, helped by free lumber from nearby Hastings Mill. That same year, the Canadian Pacific Railway chose Vancouver as its western terminus, linking the Pacific to the Atlantic. Suddenly, this once-remote spot became Canada’s gateway to the world.

Vancouver has seen its share of conflict. During the First World War, Japanese Canadian fishermen who volunteered to fight overseas were honored at Stanley Park. Yet discrimination grew at home.

By the Second World War, thousands of Japanese Canadians from Vancouver were forced into internment camps, losing homes and businesses. The city later apologized, and that memory still shapes how Vancouver sees itself.

Famous figures also left their mark. Gassy Jack Deighton, a talkative Englishman, opened the saloon that sparked the original settlement of Gastown. Emily Carr, one of Canada’s most beloved painters, drew inspiration from British Columbia’s forests and Indigenous cultures.

In modern times, Greenpeace launched its first protests from Vancouver’s docks, helping ignite the global environmental movement.

Few cities let you trace history from harbor to rainforest as easily as Vancouver. In Gastown, a steam-powered clock puffs away on the same cobbled streets where loggers once gathered.

Stanley Park holds towering totem poles and views of a harbor that fueled the city’s rise. Granville Island bustles with markets, once home to sawmills and factories.

And in Chinatown, reminders remain of the immigrants who built the railways and shaped this diverse, energetic city. In Vancouver, the past is never separate from the present — it’s woven into the neighborhoods, the shoreline, and the forest paths that make the city unique.