Victoria

Coast Salish peoples, among them the Lekwungen and the W̱SÁNEĆ, lived around the harbours of southern Vancouver Island long before Europeans arrived. Spanish ships visited Esquimalt Harbour in the early 1790s, and in 1843 the Hudson's Bay Company built a trading post at a place called Camosack, "rush of water", renamed Fort Victoria in November that year after the queen. The Songhees built a village across the harbour from the fort, and the colony of Vancouver Island was created in 1849, with the fort's chief factor, James Douglas, later its governor.

When news of gold on the Fraser River reached San Francisco in 1858, Victoria became the port and outfitting base for thousands of miners, and Chinese arrivals from California founded what is now Canada's oldest Chinatown. The city was incorporated in 1862, the year Victoria was the centre of a smallpox epidemic that killed about two-thirds of the First Nations people in British Columbia. The Royal Navy made Esquimalt its North Pacific base in 1865, Victoria was chosen as capital of the united colony in 1868, and it became the provincial capital when British Columbia joined Canada in 1871.

As Vancouver overtook it as the commercial centre, Victoria cultivated a genteel image of gardens and British manners, helped by the Butchart Gardens, opened in 1904. A building boom that ended just before the First World War left the Edwardian streets of the centre. Since the Second World War the region has grown steadily around government, two universities and the navy, and since the 1980s new suburbs such as Langford and Colwood have spread to the west.

Victoria is known as the Garden City, and its mild climate lets flowers bloom in late winter while most of Canada is under snow. The city's British image — tea rooms, gardens, double-decker buses and stone public buildings — sits alongside its Indigenous foundations: Thunderbird Park beside the museum, Songhees names such as míqәn for Beacon Hill and the First Peoples Gallery at the Royal BC Museum. Emily Carr, the painter and writer, grew up in Victoria, and her childhood home is now a national historic site.

Cultural life is concentrated downtown, where theatres, pubs and clubs gather and the big public events take place. The Victoria Symphony plays at the Royal Theatre and the university from autumn to spring and stages Symphony Splash on a barge in the harbour each summer. Music festivals, a dragon boat festival, a tall ships festival and the Swiftsure yacht races bring crowds to the waterfront.

The pace is slower than Vancouver's. Victoria has a large retired population and a strong outdoor habit — walking the shore, cycling the Galloping Goose, sailing and kayaking. The city is also one of the most gender-diverse in Canada, and civic politics is often concerned with heritage, housing and how thirteen separate municipalities share one region.

The City of Victoria had about 92,000 people at the 2021 census, and the metropolitan area about 397,000, spread across thirteen municipalities. Almost a quarter of the region's people are over 65, well above the Canadian average.

The provincial government, the navy base at Esquimalt, the University of Victoria and Camosun College are the big employers, and health care and public administration are the largest fields of work. Technology has become the largest revenue-producing private industry, with hundreds of firms, and tourism brings millions of overnight visitors a year. Housing costs and homelessness are pressing local issues: during the COVID-19 pandemic many homeless people camped in parks, including Beacon Hill Park, until in March 2021 the city reinstated a ban on daytime camping in parks and, with the province, pledged to find indoor accommodation for those camping there.

Daily life follows a gentle rhythm. Many people cycle or take the bus to work, and evenings and weekends are spent on the waterfront, in the parks or on the island's trails. Many households, and much of the city's tourist trade, depend on the ferries that link the island to the mainland.

Victoria's cooking draws on the Pacific: wild salmon, eaten grilled, smoked or as candied salmon, the sweet cured strips sold at markets, along with spot prawns, Dungeness crab and halibut. Salmon remains central to First Nations food and ceremony, and in autumn the salmon run up the Goldstream River just outside the city. Seafood is the obvious choice at harbour-side restaurants, within sight of the floatplanes and whale-watching boats.

The city's long-cultivated British image shows in its tea rooms, where afternoon tea is served in the English manner, and in the pubs that cluster downtown. Chinatown, the oldest in Canada, still has Chinese restaurants and bakeries among its alleys and courtyards, and Market Square and the Old Town streets hold cafés and restaurants of many kinds. The Nanaimo bar — a no-bake slice of crumb base, custard icing and chocolate — takes its name from the city of Nanaimo, further up the island.

Vancouver Island produces a smaller amount of wine than the Okanagan, and craft breweries and cideries are part of local drinking life, as they are in every British Columbia town. Bannock, a simple fried or baked bread, is served at Indigenous food stalls.