Victorians display their love for the natural world by cultivating flower gardens at every turn.
As you'd imagine in a region where a large urban population interacts with such a delightful natural tableau, a vast network of walking, hiking, and biking routes leads through the many parks with which the city is blessed. It's easy to imagine how sweet life was for Native Canadians who once had this all to themselves. Beacon Hill Park in downtown Victoria was the site of a village that had been inhabited for thousands of years prior to the arrival of the colonial settlers in the 1840s. A tangled web of events since then has displaced the original dwellers, but their history is evident in the petroglyphs that adorn the shoreline and in the middens of seashells mounded up beside the beaches on Strait of Juan de Fuca. Totem poles new and old stand as proud reminders of this heritage.