Stanley Park & the seawall
A 10 km waterfront loop around an urban rainforest.
Vancouver in pictures
Vancouver
Where the mountains meet the sea
Destinations › North America › Vancouver
Glass towers against the North Shore mountains, the Stanley Park seawall and some of Canada's best food — Vancouver is the gateway to the Pacific coast.
Fly from Toronto in about 5 hours nonstop. VIA Rail's The Canadian also reaches Vancouver, but it's a multi-day cross-country journey rather than a quick trip.
The driverless SkyTrain is fast and easy; downtown, Gastown and the seawall are walkable; and the SeaBus crosses the harbour to the North Shore.
A 10 km waterfront loop around an urban rainforest.
A public market and artisan quarter under the bridge.
A swaying walk high above the rainforest canyon.
Skiing (or hiking) minutes from downtown.
The dense low-rise blocks between downtown and Stanley Park - Denman, Davie and Robson streets, with English Bay at the end of them. Flat, genuinely walkable, thick with small hotels and rentals, and you can be on the Stanley Park seawall in ten minutes. This is the base to pick if you are travelling with parents or pushing a stroller. Skip it if you want a nightlife strip: it is residential and it goes quiet early.
The oldest part of the city - brick warehouses, the steam clock, Water Street, design shops and coffee. Worth a morning. Two honest caveats before you book a room here: Water Street is laid with real setts and cobbles, which is punishing for wheelchairs, walkers and canes, and the Downtown Eastside begins immediately to the east around Main and East Hastings. Fine to visit, a poor choice to base a family.
Across False Creek on the west side. Kits Beach, 4th Avenue, leafy streets of older houses, Vanier Park and the Museum of Vancouver. Quieter and more residential, good with young kids and good if you run in the mornings. The catch is that you are bus-dependent to reach downtown, and West Broadway is currently a construction site for the Millennium Line's Broadway extension out to Arbutus Street, which the province has pushed back to late 2027 from an original 2025 target.
Twenty-odd minutes from downtown on the Canada Line and next door to the airport. The Golden Village around No. 3 Road and Alexandra Road is one of the densest concentrations of Chinese food in North America, and Steveston's working fishing village is a short bus ride further south. Base here if you are eating your way through the trip, arriving late, or visiting family. Do not base here if you came for mountains and old brick - it is suburban, low-rise and car-shaped.
Not a tourist version of it. Richmond's Golden Village - Alexandra Road and the malls off No. 3 Road - plus Vancouver's Chinatown serve the real thing, mostly ordered from a paper sheet now rather than off trolleys. Late weekend mornings are the busiest stretch of the week; go early or expect to put your name down and wait.
Vancouver's Japanese food scene is unusually deep for a city this size, and the style most associated with the city is aburi - flame-seared pressed sushi with a torched, faintly sweet top. Denman and Robson streets in the West End are thick with small sushi counters and izakaya; Broadway and Main also have clusters.
Granville Island Public Market, under the south end of the Granville Bridge in False Creek, puts it all in one room: sockeye and coho, candied and cold-smoked salmon, Dungeness crab, and the three-layer Nanaimo bar - wafer-crumb base, custard icing, chocolate on top - which takes its name from the Vancouver Island city. Spot prawn season is a short spring window and the fishmongers make a lot of noise about it when it is on.
A large open-air Asian street-food market that runs from spring into autumn right beside Bridgeport station on the Canada Line - takoyaki, grilled squid, spiral-cut potato, bubble tea and a great deal of queueing. It runs on evenings towards the end of the week and it does not run in winter, so confirm the season and the days before you build a night around it.
Start at Waterfront Station, where the SkyTrain, the SeaBus and the Canada Line from the airport all meet. Walk east into Gastown for Water Street and the steam clock, then south on Carrall into Chinatown for the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. Turn back west at Main Street - do not carry on east along Hastings.
Walk back through downtown to Canada Place and pick up the seawall heading west. It runs through Coal Harbour straight into Stanley Park; the park loop is about 8.8 km, flat, paved and split into separate walking and cycling lanes, so do whatever fraction suits your group and turn back. Finish at Third Beach or English Bay for the sunset.
Take the Aquabus or a False Creek Ferry from the foot of Hornby Street or from Yaletown across to Granville Island. It is a few minutes in a tiny boat and far nicer than the bus. Do the Public Market, then walk west out to Vanier Park and the Museum of Vancouver.
From Vanier Park walk up into Kitsilano, or take a bus up from Cornwall Avenue, for 4th Avenue and Kits Beach. If the weather turns, swap it: back downtown and out on the SkyTrain to Commercial-Broadway for Commercial Drive's Italian and Latin American strip, which is all indoors and all eating.
Canada Line south to Aberdeen or Richmond-Brighouse for dim sum in the Golden Village, then a local bus south to Steveston for the boardwalk, fresh fish sold off the boats at the dock, and the Gulf of Georgia Cannery national historic site.
SeaBus from Waterfront to Lonsdale Quay - about twelve minutes across Burrard Inlet, and a sightseeing cruise in everything but name. Then the 236 bus up to Grouse Mountain, or to Lynn Canyon if you want a suspension bridge without the crowds. Come back at dusk for the city lights off the water.
Highway 99 north from Horseshoe Bay is one of the best drives in the country, with Howe Sound on your left the whole way. Roughly two hours by car, or take the YVR Skylynx coach, which runs from the airport and downtown through Squamish to Whistler year-round. Break the trip at Britannia Beach for the Britannia Mine Museum, and at Squamish for Shannon Falls and the Sea to Sky Gondola.
BC Ferries Route 1 runs Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay, a crossing of about an hour and thirty-five minutes threading through the Gulf Islands. Add the road time at each end and it is a genuine full day, so leave early. The BC Ferries Connector coach from downtown Vancouver bundles the bus and the sailing so you do not need a car. Inner Harbour, the Parliament Buildings, and Butchart Gardens out at Brentwood Bay.
The easy one, and the right call if a two-hour drive is too much. The 257 express bus from downtown out to Horseshoe Bay, then BC Ferries Route 8 to Snug Cove - a twenty-minute crossing you can walk straight onto without a reservation. Snug Cove village, the loop walk around Killarney Lake, and home by mid-afternoon.
Vancouver is one of the easier North American cities to do with a parent who does not move quickly, and the reason is the trains. TransLink states that all of its SkyTrain stations are equipped with elevators for people using wheelchairs or other mobility devices, so the rail network is effectively step-free - including the Canada Line, which takes you from the airport to downtown in about twenty-five minutes with your luggage and no stairs. That single fact removes the worst hour of most arrivals. Check for elevator outages before you set out, because a single lift out of service can strand you. TransLink's conventional buses are wheelchair accessible, though TransLink is upfront that some individual bus stops are still not properly set up for safe entering and exiting with a mobility aid, so check the stop in the trip planner rather than assuming. The Stanley Park seawall is the best asset in the city for slow walkers: roughly 8.8 km of flat, paved, separated path with benches, washrooms and constant water views, and you can walk any twenty minutes of it and turn around. Granville Island, Canada Place, the SeaBus and the Aquabus all give you a sit-down with a view and easy boarding. Where it gets hard: Gastown's Water Street is genuine cobble and hurts anything with wheels. Downtown Vancouver is on a slope, so north-south blocks between the water and Robson are steeper than they look on a map. Capilano Suspension Bridge sways and its Cliffwalk has stairs; Lynn Canyon is free but the descent to the bridge is a long flight of steps. Grouse Mountain is reached by gondola, which is fine, but the Grouse Grind is a mountain staircase and is not a walk. West Broadway is torn up for the Millennium Line's Broadway extension, with rolling lane and street closures, so if you are staying in Mount Pleasant or Fairview with a stroller, check current construction notices and factor in detours and noise. Weather matters more here than terrain: October to March is properly wet, not dramatic but relentless, and a day of grey drizzle will end an older visitor's enthusiasm faster than any hill. For GTA families the flight is about five hours and Vancouver is three hours behind Toronto, which means the westbound trip is kind on children and elders and the return red-eye is the one that hurts. Book the daytime flight home.
Canadian dollars. Tap-to-pay is close to universal and cash is rarely needed for anything. You can tap a contactless credit card or phone directly at SkyTrain fare gates and on bus readers for adult single fares, so a Compass card is optional on a short visit - though tapping a bank card charges the higher cash-equivalent fare rather than the discounted Compass rate, so a Compass card is still worth it if you are riding a lot. Note that a YVR AddFare applies when you start a journey at a Sea Island station leaving the airport, but not when you travel towards it.
British Columbia norms are the same as Ontario's: 15 to 20 percent at sit-down restaurants, and the card terminal will offer you preset percentages you are free to override. Nothing expected at counter service or takeout, though the screen will ask. Round up for taxis, and tip hotel porters and tour guides per service.
Type A and Type B sockets, 120 volts, 60 Hz - identical to Ontario and to the United States. If you are coming from the GTA there is nothing to pack and no converter to buy.
Safe and very good. Metro Vancouver's supply comes from protected mountain watersheds on the North Shore and in the Coquitlam valley, and it is treated and disinfected before it reaches the tap. Refill a bottle; there are drinking fountains along the seawall and through Stanley Park.
English. Cantonese and Mandarin are widely spoken in Richmond and across parts of east Vancouver, and Punjabi is prominent in parts of Surrey - if you are visiting family in those communities you may barely need English. French appears on federal signage, and while British Columbia has a small francophone community, you will not hear much of it day to day.
Vancouver has low violent crime and a serious property-crime problem, and they are different things. Vehicle break-ins at trailheads, ski-hill parking and beach lots are routine - never leave anything visible in a rental car, including an empty bag. Separately, the Downtown Eastside around Main and East Hastings is an open drug scene with heavy visible distress, and it sits directly against the east edge of Gastown and Chinatown. It is confronting rather than typically dangerous to a passer-by, but you do not want to walk your parents into it by accident. From Gastown, walk west.
July to September brings warm, dry days; winter is rainy in the city but offers skiing minutes away.
Compare the ways to get there, then build a day-by-day plan.
Fly from Toronto in about 5 hours nonstop. VIA Rail's The Canadian also reaches Vancouver, but it's a multi-day cross-country journey rather than a quick trip.
The driverless SkyTrain is fast and easy; downtown, Gastown and the seawall are walkable; and the SeaBus crosses the harbour to the North Shore.
July to September brings warm, dry days; winter is rainy in the city but offers skiing minutes away.