Victoria: Inner Harbour

Stand at the rail here and look out across the water. Almost everything that makes this the most photographed view in the province — the domes, the ivy-covered hotel, the whole civic stage set — was drawn by one man, and he was startlingly young when he got the job. In 1892 the province ran an open competition for a new Legislature. Entries came in under pseudonyms so the judges couldn't play favourites. The winning drawings belonged to a 25-year-old immigrant, barely arrived, with no monumental building behind him. He got the commission anyway, and by 1898 the Parliament Buildings you're looking at were finished. He'd go on to fill in the rest of this skyline within about a decade — which is why the postcard looks so unified. It was essentially designed all at once, by someone learning on the job at enormous scale. That's the thread we'll follow, and it goes a long way. Over the next couple of hours you'll get a fur-trade fort that talked its way into becoming a capital city, a gold rush that flooded this harbour with thousands of strangers in a single summer, houses built for people who were rich beyond reason, and the long, complicated story of a shore that had a name and a purpose for thousands of years before any of it. Because this is Lekwungen water. It was Lekwungen water when the fort went up, and it still is. Everything else here is recent.