Vancouver, Canada · North America

6 ideal things to do in Vancouver

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked July 15, 2025

1. 01

   Museum of Anthropology at UBC

   Point Grey, at the western end of the city·Allow a half day; the bus out takes longer than the map suggests

   Arthur Erickson put the Great Hall behind a wall of glass facing the water, so the house posts and canoes stand in daylight against sea and mountains rather than under gallery spots, and it is the best single decision made by any museum I have walked into. Bill Reid's Raven and the First Men, carved out of laminated yellow cedar in 1980, has its own rotunda. The collection is Northwest Coast first and global second. Go on a grey day — the light through that wall is better in rain, which in this city is not a demanding condition to satisfy.

2. 02

   Granville Island Public Market, arriving by mini-ferry

   Under the Granville Street Bridge, on False Creek·Morning; it is a working market before it is a lunch destination

   Industrial land dredged out of False Creek in 1915, which kept its sheds and became a public market in 1979 — the rare regeneration scheme that did not end up as a shopping centre with exposed brickwork. Come across on one of the tubby little False Creek ferries instead of walking in past the car park; the approach is half of it. Salmon, absurd loaves, produce, and a seagull population with a professional grasp of misdirection. I lost a pastry to one and was told by a vendor, very kindly, that everybody loses one.

3. 03

   The Grouse Grind

   North Shore, at the base of Grouse Mountain·Summer and early autumn; the trail closes over winter

   Eight hundred and fifty metres of gain over two point nine kilometres, 2,830 steps, and a nickname — Mother Nature's Stairmaster — doing no exaggerating whatsoever. It runs one way, uphill only, so at least nobody can come down past you while you are quietly dying in the ferns. Ninety minutes is a normal time. Local twenty-somethings do it in half that and are insufferable. You take the gondola back down. My own time was not good and I have never disclosed it to anyone, including here.

4. 04

   Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden

   Carrall Street, Chinatown·A quiet weekday hour; the courtyards get loud the moment a group arrives

   Fifty-odd artisans came over from Suzhou for Expo 86 and built this with Ming methods and no power tools — the first full-scale classical Chinese garden made outside China. It is small on purpose, since the entire discipline is about making a walled quarter-acre feel unbounded, and it works by never letting you see the whole of itself at once. Vancouver's winters are close enough to Suzhou's that most of the planting is authentic. Sit by the pond and let a leaking window frame do its work on you.

5. 05

   The SeaBus to Lonsdale Quay

   Waterfront Station across Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver·A clear evening — out at dusk, back after dark

   Twelve minutes across the inlet on an ordinary commuter ferry, on an ordinary transit fare, past container cranes and grain terminals with the North Shore mountains going pink behind them. It is the best cheap view in the city and it is not sold as a view at all; everyone aboard is looking at their phone. Split runs ferries too, but ours take four hours, go to islands, and somebody is always eating a burek. Get off at Lonsdale Quay, walk the pier, ride back.

6. 06

   Emily Carr at the Vancouver Art Gallery

   750 Hornby Street, downtown·Late afternoon on a wet day, which narrows it down very little

   Housed in the old provincial courthouse, so you look at paintings in rooms built for sentencing people, and the Emily Carr holdings are the reason to make the trip. Her forests are painted as weather rather than as scenery — green in motion, trunks leaning, the whole canvas mid-verb. Walking straight out of that into an actual Vancouver drizzle is the closest thing to a controlled experiment this city offers, and the drizzle comes off worse.