Vancouver

Vancouver, city, southwestern British Columbia, Canada. It is the major urban centre of western Canada and the focus of one of the country’s most populous metropolitan regions. Vancouver lies between Burrard Inlet (an arm of the Strait of Georgia) to the north and the Fraser River delta to the south, opposite Vancouver Island. The city is just north of the U.S. state of Washington. It has a fine natural harbour on a superb site facing the sea and mountains. Pop. (2011) 603,502; metro. area, 2,313,328; (2021) 662,248; metro. area, 2,642,825.

History

The region had long been inhabited by several Native American (First Nations) peoples when a trading post, Fort Langley, was set up by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1827 near the mouth of the Fraser River. Few people of European descent lived in the area until the late 1850s, when the town of New Westminster (now a suburb of Vancouver) was established near the site of the original fort (in 1839 the fort itself had been relocated a little farther upstream). Thousands of miners, mostly from California, flooded into the region in the 1860s, attracted by the gold rush in the Cariboo Mountains to the northeast. Besides the Scottish, who were very influential in Vancouver’s early years, Americans had a notable impact on the city. The suggestion to name it Vancouver was made by an American, William Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. And the city’s most-often elected mayor (nine nonconsecutive terms from 1919 to 1933), L.D. Taylor, was originally from the United States. Moreover, the first important industry in the area, a sawmill on Burrard Inlet, was owned by an American. Finally, the first major industry not reliant on local natural resources, a still-active sugar refinery, was started by an American.

Vancouver was originally a small sawmilling settlement, called Granville in the 1870s. It was incorporated as a city in April 1886 (just before it became the western terminus of the first trans-Canada railway, the Canadian Pacific) and was renamed to honour the English navigator George Vancouver, of the Royal Navy, who had explored and surveyed the coast in 1792. A disastrous fire just two months after incorporation destroyed the city in less than an hour. The city recovered, however, to become a prosperous port, aided in part by the opening of the Panama Canal (1914), which made it economically feasible to export grain and lumber from Vancouver to the east coast of the United States and to Europe. In 1929 two large suburbs to the south, Point Grey and South Vancouver, amalgamated with Vancouver, and its metropolitan area became the third most populous in Canada. By the 1930s Vancouver was Canada’s major Pacific coast port. After World War II it developed into Canada’s main business hub for trade with Asia and the Pacific Rim.

The city has long been a popular destination for immigrants both from other parts of Canada and from overseas. Notable has been the influx of East Asians, primarily Chinese, especially since World War II. Anti-Asian riots and outbreaks of violence were not infrequent during the city’s earliest years. Resistance to Asian immigration was also evidenced in the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, in which the ship of that name, carrying more than 300 Indians, was not allowed to disembark its passengers (all British subjects) and was forced to return to India.

The contemporary city

Nestled among snow-capped mountains on an ocean inlet, Vancouver has one of the most picturesque settings of any city in the world. In his 1792 journal, Captain Vancouver wrote:

To describe the beauties of this region will on some future occasion be a very grateful task to the pen of a skilled panegyrist. The serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, requires only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages, and other buildings.

Its climate is marked by mild wet winters and moderately warm summers. Temperatures range from highs in the low 70s F (about 22 °C) in August to lows in the low 30s F (about 0.8 °C) in December. The city’s proximity to the water and to mountains results in constantly changing weather conditions. Rainfall is heavy in November and December, with an average of about 7 inches (about 180 mm) in both months.

The city is the industrial, commercial, and financial heart of British Columbia, with trade and transportation as basic components of its economy. Its ice-free deepwater port (on Burrard Inlet), Canada’s largest, has extensive docks and grain elevator facilities; it handles freighters, a fishing fleet, and some ferries. Major cargoes include bulk commodities (grain, coal, sulfur, potash, and petrochemicals), forest products, steel, and containers. It is also an important port for cruise ships, with Alaska as their most common destination.

The region is served by three rail lines, with connections to the United States. Vancouver International Airport (1931), located on Sea Island in Richmond, provides air links to elsewhere in Canada and to the rest of the world, while highways connect the city by road to the eastern provinces (via the Trans-Canada Highway) and to Seattle, Washington, which is located about 120 miles (200 km) to the south. Since the mid-1980s the Greater Vancouver area has been served by an automated light-rail system called SkyTrain. A recent expansion of the system, the Canada Line, links the city to the airport, and further expansions are planned. The SeaBus connects Vancouver with North Vancouver across Burrard Inlet; other provincially owned ferries go to Vancouver Island and to many small islands in the Strait of Georgia. In addition, a commuter rail line connects downtown Vancouver with points eastward to the city of Mission.

Forestry, tourism, and mining are important economic activities; related factors are manufacturing and shipping. Processing of forest and agricultural products and fish also are significant, as is oil refining. Production of metals, chemicals, boats, trucks, and machinery for sawmilling, mining, and pulp and paper processing are major manufacturing activities. Power for sawmilling and plywood and paper manufacturing is provided by hydroelectric developments to the north and by oil and natural gas pipelines from Alberta.

The city has become a centre for high-technology industries and for television and film production. Indeed, in the early 21st century it ranked after Los Angeles and New York City as the third largest film-production location in North America, and many television programs are produced in the region. American film and TV companies are attracted to the city by its ability to “stand in” for other places, by its lower production costs, and by the professional expertise of the local crews.

Vancouver’s atmosphere is somewhat British in character with East Asian overtones. Its rich mix of nationalities has made the city one of North America’s most cosmopolitan places. Ethnic Chinese—most are locally born but many came to the area from Hong Kong when rule there was returned to China—constitute more than half of the population of the suburb of Richmond, which of all Canada’s municipalities in the early 21st century had the second highest proportion of residents who were “visible minorities,” more than three-fourths. There are sizeable numbers of Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, and Iranian residents, along with a great number of South Asians (primarily from India), in metropolitan Vancouver. Many of the latter live in the suburb of Surrey.

The Indian (First Nations) inhabitants of the metropolitan Vancouver area are increasing their economic impact within the region. In 2009 the Tsawwassen people initiated through their economic development corporation a project to construct an industrial park in the suburb of Delta, just south of Vancouver, on their lands abutting the Strait of Georgia. First Nations workers from the entire metropolitan area were to be employed in this project, expected to span 5 to 10 years.

Vancouver’s Chinatown is overshadowed on the Pacific coast only by San Francisco’s, but since the 1990s it has lost a great deal of business to Chinese establishments in Richmond. Gastown, a restoration of the original 1880s-era heart of the city, is a popular tourist attraction. Its historic buildings are occupied by souvenir shops, restaurants, art galleries, and furniture stores. On the southeastern edge of downtown Vancouver is the Yaletown neighbourhood, once a warehouse district and now the centre of a thriving mix of upscale shops and restaurants and lofty apartment towers. The business and financial district adjoins the port facilities along Burrard Inlet. Large, attractively landscaped residential suburbs extend to the south and east along the mouth of the Fraser River and include the communities of Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam, Port Moody, Port Coquitlam, Surrey, Delta, and Richmond. Each of these suburbs has its own civic administration, but a regional government—Metro Vancouver—administers the water and sewerage systems and some parks.

Also part of Metro Vancouver are the residential suburbs of North Vancouver and West Vancouver, which lie to the north across Burrard Inlet and are backed by steep mountains of the Coast Range that rise up to 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) high. Two prominent peaks overlooking the harbour are called the Lions, and they give the entrance to the harbour its name, Lions Gate. North Vancouver and West Vancouver are connected to the central city by the Lions Gate Bridge, built in 1938 and officially opened in 1939 by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and by Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing (1960), which was originally called Second Narrows Bridge and was renamed in 1994 in tribute to 19 men killed in the 1958 collapse of the bridge while it was under construction and to four others killed in other incidents.

Stanley Park, with its gardens and large public aquarium, occupies some 1,000 acres (400 hectares) of the downtown peninsula at the harbour entrance and is surrounded by a scenic 5.5-mile (8.8-km) seawall that is popular with strollers, joggers, and inline skaters. Lost Lagoon, at the entrance to the park, was named by poet Pauline Johnson, daughter of an Ontario Mohawk chief, for the tidal forces that regularly emptied the lagoon. Today its 41 acres (16.6 hectares) are enclosed, but the old name has been retained. The 55-acre (22-hectare) VanDusen Botanical Garden excels among many other parks and gardens in the city. Bloedel Floral Conservatory lies just to the east in Queen Elizabeth Park, named in 1939 for the Queen Mother. Cypress and Mount Seymour provincial parks are nearby.

Granville Island, directly beneath the Granville Street Bridge, was an industrial area in False Creek that was created with landfill around two small sandbars and transformed into a peninsula in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s the federal government purchased the 38-acre (15-hectare) “island,” from which most of the industrial operations had departed, and invited restaurateurs, craftspeople, art galleries, theatre companies, and others to lease the buildings. The revitalized area was officially opened in 1977 with the inauguration of its seawall and was an immediate success, with more than 10 million visitors a year by the early 21st century. Its large Public Market (meats, fruits, vegetables, crafts, and restaurants) is a major retail centre.

Canada Place, with its white sail-like roof, was built as the Canada Pavilion for Expo 86, a nearly six-month-long world’s fair that celebrated Vancouver’s centennial in 1986 and to which more than 22 million visits were made. Adjacent to the Vancouver Convention Centre (which opened vastly expanded facilities in April 2009), it juts out into Burrard Inlet and includes cruise-ship docking facilities, restaurants, shops, and a hotel.

Educational institutions within the metropolitan area include the University of British Columbia (1908; with the Museum of Anthropology, designed by architect Arthur Erickson, on its campus) and the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1925) in Vancouver, along with Simon Fraser University (1963) in Burnaby. Notable attractions include the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, the Museum of Vancouver, and the Vancouver Maritime Museum—all in or alongside Vanier Park—as well as the Vancouver Art Gallery (1931), which has an important permanent collection of work by British Columbia artist Emily Carr.

The city has a symphony orchestra, which performs in a variety of locations in the metropolitan area, including its permanent home, the Orpheum Theatre (1927) downtown. Opera and ballet companies are based at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre complex (1959). Vancouver has a lively theatre community, with the Arts Club Theatre, Vancouver Playhouse, East Vancouver Cultural Centre (the “Cultch”), and Richmond’s Gateway Theatre particularly prominent.

Vancouver has been home to many prominent visual artists, including painters Carr, Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, Takao Tanabe, and Toni Onley; painter, sculptor, ceramicist, and performance artist Gathie Falk; and photographer Jeff Wall. Popular musical notables include Bryan Adams, Sarah McLachlan, Michael Bublé, Nickelback, Swollen Members, and the New Pornographers. The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra plays music by local composers, who include Jean Coulthard, Paul Dolden, and Michael Conway Baker. Actors Raymond Burr, Yvonne De Carlo, Michael J. Fox, John Ireland, Pamela Anderson, Ryan Reynolds, and Carrie-Ann Moss all have called the Vancouver area home.

B.C. Place Stadium (1983) is the city’s main venue for major sporting events and concerts, in addition to being a popular site for consumer shows and special events. Adjacent to the stadium is GM Place (formally General Motors Place; 1995), home to the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League. The Vancouver Giants of the Western Hockey League play at the Pacific Coliseum. Vancouver also is home to other professional sports teams, including the Whitecaps (football [soccer]), the BC Lions (Canadian gridiron football) and the Vancouver Canadians (minor league baseball). The Coast Mountains come down to the edge of Burrard Inlet, and skiers can reach several slopes within minutes of the city.

Vancouver’s picturesque natural setting and cultural amenities helped land the city the 2010 Olympic Winter Games and Paralympic Winter Games, with about half the events scheduled at the winter sports area in Whistler, about 80 miles (130 km) north of the city.