England's most English city outside England — where Victoria is the capital of British Columbia but feels like a small English market town transplanted to a Pacific island, the Empress Hotel (1908, Canadian Pacific Chateau-style) serves high afternoon tea to 800 guests daily in the most famous hotel tradition in Canada, the Butchart Gardens (55 acres in a former limestone quarry, 900 varieties of plants, open year-round) are the finest private gardens in North America, the Inner Harbour has whale-watching zodiac boats departing every hour (resident pods of southern resident orca, humpback whales, Dall's porpoises), and Victoria holds the Canadian record for most sunshine hours on the Pacific coast
Victoria (95,000 city; 400,000 metro) is the capital of British Columbia on Vancouver Island — an island city accessible only by BC Ferries (90-minute crossing from Vancouver's Tsawwassen) or seaplane (35 minutes, Harbour Air floatplanes from downtown Vancouver). Victoria has an unusually British character for a Canadian city: the British colonial heritage is visible in the double-decker buses, the afternoon tea culture, the Olde English fish and chips shops, the rose gardens, and the preserved 19th-century architecture around the Inner Harbour. The climate is the mildest in Canada — the drie…
The Victoria area (Lekwungen territory, home of the Songhees and Esquimalt peoples of the Coast Salish nation) was a significant winter village site before European contact. Captain James Douglas of the Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Camosun (later Fort Victoria) in 1843 as a fur trading post and the terminus of the Pacific fur trade route. Victoria became the capital of the Colony of Vancouver Island (1849), then the Colony of British Columbia (1858), and at Confederation (1871) was confirmed as the capital of the Province of British Columbia. The Klondike Gold Rush (1896–1899) transf…