Victoria: Inner Harbour

Start with the water. Floatplanes drop onto the harbour ahead of you and climb back out of it all day, on a schedule, like buses; the small ferries putter between the docks; this is a working basin with a postcard wrapped around it. And the postcard has an author. Across the water stand the Parliament Buildings (domed, grey, outlined in lights after dark), and the man who designed them was Francis Rattenbury: twenty-five years old, newly arrived from England, who entered the competition under a pseudonym and beat every established architect in the province. The Legislature opened in 1898. Most of what your eye is enjoying right now was staged inside a single decade by one very young immigrant in a hurry. And it is the smaller half of the story. Under an hour of walking from here, this harbour keeps handing you older versions of itself: the fur-trade fort that turned into a capital, and beneath that the shore the fort was built on. These are Lekwungen lands and waters. Camosack, the rush of water, for the tide pouring through the narrows, a coastline held in six family territories, each with its own houses and its own rights to what the water gave. The Lekwungen people are here today as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. The route turns right along the causeway.