Things To Do in Vancouver Canada

Mountains, Sea and the Outdoor Life

Vancouver's setting is one of the most dramatically beautiful of any major city: the North Shore mountains rise directly behind the city's downtown core, their peaks visible from the streets and accessible by gondola or trail from the city limits, while the ocean is present to the south and west in the form of the Strait of Georgia, English Bay, and the protected waters of Burrard Inlet. The result is a city where skiing at Whistler (two hours north on the Sea-to-Sky Highway), kayaking in Indian Arm, mountain biking on the North Shore trails, and swimming at the Kitsilano or Jericho beaches are all genuinely part of the daily life of residents rather than occasional activities. Stanley Park, a 1,000-acre urban forest on a peninsula at the edge of the downtown core, is one of the largest urban parks in North America and contains within it old-growth temperate rainforest.

Food, Pacific Cuisine and the City's Table

Vancouver's food culture is shaped by the Pacific: salmon from the rivers of British Columbia, Dungeness crab, spot prawns, and the specific seafood of the northeast Pacific coast are the defining ingredients. The city's large Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and South Asian communities have created a restaurant landscape that is the most diverse in Canada outside Toronto, and the overlap between Pacific ingredients and East Asian culinary technique produces a cuisine sometimes called Pacific Rim that is authentic to the city's specific geography and immigration history. The Richmond suburb, with its concentration of Cantonese and Hong Kong-style dim sum restaurants in the Aberdeen Center and around Alexandra Road, is one of the most significant Chinese food destinations outside China.

Film Production and the Creative Economy

Vancouver is the third-largest film and television production center in North America after Los Angeles and New York, a position built on a combination of competitive production costs relative to American cities, diverse locations that can stand in for cities and landscapes across the northern hemisphere, experienced technical crews, and generous provincial tax credits. The city is often called Hollywood North, and the volume of American studio productions filming in the city at any given time means that film crews and location shoots are a constant presence in the streets. The video game industry is the most significant in Canada, with studios including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and EA Sports employing thousands of developers in the metropolitan area.

Sustainability, Design and Urban Living

Vancouver has positioned itself as one of the most environmentally progressive cities in the world, with specific targets for carbon neutrality, a cycling infrastructure that is the most developed in Canada, and urban planning policies that have made the downtown core one of the most dense and walkable in North America. The EcoDensity program and the proliferation of LEED-certified buildings reflect a city that takes its environmental commitments seriously at a planning level. The city's design and architecture community is internationally recognised, and the Vancouver Convention Center's living roof and waterfront setting exemplify an approach to public buildings that integrates environmental performance with civic presence. The Granville Island market, converted from an industrial peninsula under the Granville Bridge, is one of the most successful urban regeneration projects in Canada.

Indigenous Culture, Arts and the City's Creative Identity

Vancouver sits on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and the presence and visibility of Indigenous culture in the city is more active and ongoing than in most Canadian metropolitan centers. The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia holds one of the world's most significant collections of Northwest Coast Indigenous art and cultural materials, housed in a building designed to complement the objects it contains, and the collection of totem poles, transformation masks, and works in wood, silver, and gold represents artistic traditions of extraordinary technical and conceptual sophistication. The Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art in the city center focuses specifically on the work of an artist whose monumental bronze sculpture sits in the international terminal of Vancouver Airport and whose work was instrumental in the revival of Haida artistic practice. The city's arts infrastructure beyond Indigenous art includes the Vancouver Art Gallery in a former provincial courthouse, the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, and the Contemporary Art Gallery on the edge of Yaletown. The Fringe Festival in September, the Jazz Festival in late June, and the International Film Festival in autumn anchor a cultural calendar that the city's size and creative economy support with unusual consistency. The independent music scene, which has produced an outsized number of internationally recognised acts relative to the city's population, is most visible in the venues of the East Van corridor through Commercial Drive and Mount Pleasant. The city's film festival, held each September and October, is one of the largest in North America by number of films screened and has developed a particular strength in Asian cinema that reflects Vancouver's Pacific Rim position and the engagement of its large East Asian communities with cinema as a cultural form.