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A reconstructed building at the Fortress of Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, photographed in 2016.
CA-K334History

The Fortress of Louisbourg

The Fortress of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island, was established by France as a critical fishing, trans-shipment and supply port and served as administrative capital of Île Royale, with a government, garrison and civilian population. Between 1713 and 1768 it was a place of profound significance in the struggle between France and Britain for empire.

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Photo: KenCLeBlanc · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Cabot Tower on Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, photographed in 2013.
CA-K333History

Signal Hill and Marconi’s 1901 transmission

Signal Hill, overlooking the Narrows into St. John’s Harbour, was important for defence and communications for three centuries, with fortifications built as France and Britain battled for the continent. In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless transmission atop the hill, a landmark in global communications history.

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Photo: KristaKals · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
The Millennium Gate on West Pender Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown, photographed in 2012.
CA-K331History

Vancouver’s Chinatown

Vancouver’s Chinatown, one of the oldest and largest in Canada, developed as a self-segregated enclave partly because of racial hostility elsewhere in the city before the Second World War, and reflects the contributions and struggles of Chinese Canadians. It is known for a distinctive “recessed balcony” architecture that blends Chinese regional styles with western building methods.

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Photo: MRDXII · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
A commemorative plaque at the Nazrey African Methodist Episcopal Church in Amherstburg, Ontario, photographed in 2015.
CA-K330History

Nazrey AME Church, Amherstburg

In 1848, refugees from American slavery built the Nazrey African Methodist Episcopal Church by hand to serve Amherstburg’s growing Black community. The stone chapel is perhaps the building type most representative of Underground Railroad communities, and it is associated with Bishop Willis Nazrey, first leader of the British Methodist Episcopal Church, a wholly Canadian denomination founded by Underground Railroad refugees.

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Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
Griffin House in Ancaster, Ontario, photographed in 2010.
CA-K329History

Griffin House, Ancaster

Griffin House in Ancaster, Ontario, was the home of Enerals Griffin, a Black immigrant from Virginia who settled there in 1834, and remained in his family for 154 years. A rare surviving example of early Upper Canadian vernacular housing, it shows the complexity of the Black experience: it was more elaborate than most refugees’ homes and stood in a mainly Euro-Canadian community rather than a planned refugee settlement.

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Photo: Graeme MacKay from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
Shingwauk Hall, the former school’s main building, now part of Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, photographed in 2012.
CA-K328Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

The former Shingwauk Indian Residential School

The Shingwauk Indian Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, opened by the Anglican Church in 1875 and closed in 1970, was part of the residential school system that sought to assimilate Indigenous children by separating them from their families, cultures and languages. Named for Chief Shingwaukonse, whose vision of education was lost, it was a Shingwauk school “in name only”; its main building, Shingwauk Hall, is one of the few remaining residential school buildings in Canada.

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Photo: Fungus Guy · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
The eastern shore of Beausoleil Island, looking out over Severn Sound, photographed in 2026.
CA-K326Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Beausoleil Island (Bimadinaagogi), an Anishinaabeg landscape

Beausoleil Island in Georgian Bay, named Bimadinaagogi (“a ridge extending and growing along”) by the Anishinaabeg, is a cultural landscape and place of memory for Indigenous Peoples’ relationships with the land and water. Indigenous narratives record the island’s creation and its importance to Anishinaabeg women who gathered plants and held ceremonies there, after some ten thousand years of occupation.

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Photo: Explorers' Edge · Photo licence: CC0 · Credit & context
The site of Fort Amherst, Prince Edward Island, photographed in 2013.
CA-K325History

Skmaqn–Port-la-Joye–Fort Amherst

Skmaqn–Port-la-Joye–Fort Amherst, on Prince Edward Island, was the seat of colonial government from 1720 to 1768, first under the French and then the British. It was a port of entry and a place where Mi’kmaq and French leaders renewed their alliance. In 1758, British authorities used Fort Amherst to organize the forcible removal of more than 3,000 Acadians from the island.

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Photo: Larry from Charlottetown, PEI, Canada · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
The Sunken Garden at Butchart Gardens, British Columbia, photographed in 2006.
CA-K322Culture & sport

Butchart Gardens, a quarry turned garden

Butchart Gardens, on the Saanich Peninsula about 21 kilometres north of Victoria, is an internationally known attraction open to visitors since 1904. The gardens occupy a former quarry beside Tod Inlet and were developed under the guidance of Jennie Butchart between 1904 and 1939.

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Photo: Warfieldian · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
Tilting seen from Tilting Harbour, Fogo Island, photographed in 2017.
CA-K320Places & geography

Tilting, an Irish outport on Fogo Island

Tilting, a fishing community on the east coast of Fogo Island off Newfoundland’s northeast coast, is a living outport landscape of small wooden houses, outbuildings, gardens and pathways around its harbour. Its family neighbourhood clusters and fenced gardens illustrate adaptations of Irish settlement patterns and traditional outport life.

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Photo: Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble · Photo licence: CC BY 2.0 · Credit & context
Houses in the ghost town of Val-Jalbert, Quebec, photographed in 2008.
CA-K319Economy & trade

Val-Jalbert, a pulp and paper company town

Val-Jalbert, near Lac Saint-Jean in Quebec, was founded in 1901 around a pulp and paper mill. The mill’s closure in 1927 led to the village’s gradual abandonment. Its mill, institutional buildings and wooden workers’ houses were conserved and developed as an open-air museum in the early 1960s, reflecting growing interest in heritage preservation.

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Photo: Mathieu BROSSAIS · Photo licence: CC BY 4.0 · Credit & context
The Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston, Richmond, British Columbia, photographed in 2019.
CA-K318Economy & trade

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery, Steveston

The Gulf of Georgia Cannery, a large complex of wooden fish-processing and canning buildings on a wharf at the mouth of the Fraser River in Steveston, British Columbia, recalls the West Coast fishing industry from the 1870s on. Its buildings, built and modified between 1894 and 1964, stand in what was historically the most important fishing village on the West Coast.

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Photo: Ymblanter · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Massey Hall in downtown Toronto, photographed in 2017.
CA-K317Culture & sport

Massey Hall, Toronto’s concert hall since 1894

Massey Hall, a red-brick concert hall in downtown Toronto that opened in 1894, was a gift to the city from industrialist Hart Massey. Toronto’s major concert hall for much of the 20th century, it is one of Canada’s most important cultural institutions and renowned for its outstanding acoustics.

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Photo: Arild Vågen · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Fan Tan Alley in Victoria’s Chinatown, photographed in 2018.
CA-K315History

Victoria’s Chinatown, the oldest in Canada

Victoria’s Chinatown is the oldest surviving Chinatown in Canada. Before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, Victoria was a major port of entry for Chinese immigrants, and the neighbourhood became an important centre of Chinese Canadian community life.

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Photo: Michal Klajban · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The Gur Sikh Temple (Abbotsford Sikh Temple), British Columbia, photographed in 2012.
CA-K314History

The Abbotsford Sikh Temple, 1911

The Abbotsford Sikh Temple in British Columbia, built in 1911 and used continuously since, is the oldest surviving example of the temples that played a crucial religious, social and political role in the pioneer phase of Sikh immigration to North America. Its simple false-front wooden building adapts Sikh traditions to a Canadian architectural form.

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Photo: Jacobsimmonds · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Credit & context
The Vancouver Japanese Language School and Hall on Alexander Street, Vancouver, photographed in 2016.
CA-K313Language & names

The Vancouver Japanese Language School

The Vancouver Japanese Language School, in the city’s Japantown, was the first and largest Japanese language school in Canada, and its 1928 Art Deco building is a rare surviving interwar language school. Of the thousands of properties the federal government confiscated from Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, it is one of very few known buildings returned to its owners after internment.

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Photo: Cordovanorth · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
A sign for North Buxton Park in the Buxton Settlement area, Ontario, photographed in 2015; it does not show the settlement’s original buildings.
CA-K312History

The Buxton Settlement, a planned refugee community

The Buxton Settlement National Historic Site in southwestern Ontario encompasses a cultural landscape of about 4,680 hectares, including North and South Buxton. Its farms, religious institutions and schools preserve the history of a planned settlement founded by Underground Railroad refugees and remain a living memorial to its founders.

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Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
The Africville Monument at Seaview Memorial Park, Halifax, listing the community’s founding families, photographed in 2017.
CA-K311History

Africville, a site of remembrance

Africville, on Bedford Basin in Halifax, was a Black community settled in the 1830s and 1840s, with its own school and church. Its houses were demolished in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal and the land became Seaview Park; the clearance became an enduring symbol to Black Canadians of the need to defend their institutions, and the site is now a place of remembrance and pilgrimage.

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Photo: Coastal Elite from Halifax, Canada · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 · Credit & context
The burial mound at L’Anse Amour, Labrador, photographed in 2012.
CA-K309Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

L’Anse Amour, a 7,700-year-old burial mound

L’Anse Amour in southern Labrador, one of the largest and longest-used Indigenous habitation sites in Labrador, has the oldest known First Nations funerary monument in North America, built about 7,700 years ago over a young person’s burial. The grave goods include the earliest known toggling harpoon in the world.

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Photo: Pierre Gingras · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Old Women’s Buffalo Jump near Cayley, Alberta, photographed in 2009.
CA-K308Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Old Women’s Buffalo Jump

Old Women’s Buffalo Jump, in the Alberta foothills near Cayley, was used continuously for roughly 2,000 years, leaving archaeological deposits more than six metres deep at the base of its sandstone cliff. It was the site of the first major excavation of a buffalo jump on the Canadian Prairies.

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Photo: Grapher78 · Photo licence: CC BY 3.0 · Credit & context
A stone tablet dated 1717 from the French mission chapel at Meductic, as recorded around 1897.
CA-K307Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Mehtawtik (Meductic), a Wolastoqey village

Mehtawtik (Meductic), on the west bank of the Wəlastəkw (Saint John River) in New Brunswick, was the principal settlement of the Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) from before the 17th century, valued for hunting, fishing and fertile soil where families planted corn. The village site has been under the waters of the Mactaquac hydroelectric dam since 1968.

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Photo: W.O. Raymond. · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context
The mouths of Bonanza Creek and the Klondike River at the Yukon River, photographed in 1900 by Larss & Duclos.
CA-K306Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Tr’ochëk, “the place at the mouth of the river”

Tr’ochëk, at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers just south of Dawson City, represents the Hän cultural landscape of the middle Yukon River valley. For countless generations the Hän spent mid-summer to late fall at fishing camps there; its name means “the place at the mouth of the river,” and it is the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in “home” on the Yukon River.

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Photo: Larss & Duclos · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
The front of the Tse’K’wa (Charlie Lake) cave, British Columbia, photographed in 2017.
CA-K305Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Tse’K’wa, 12,500 years of human presence

Tse’K’wa, a cave near Fort St. John, British Columbia, in Dane-zaa traditional territory, holds a rare sequence of soil layers recording human settlement and environmental change from the end of the last glacial period, 12,500 years ago, to 1,000 years ago. Its lowest layers contained Palaeo-Indian stone tools, bones of late glacial animals, evidence of bison hunting and two nearly complete raven skeletons.

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Photo: Breckenheimer · Photo licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Credit & context
Mistastin Lake (Kameshtashtan), Labrador, in a Landsat 8 satellite image, 11 September 2017 (NASA).
CA-K304Indigenous peoples & reconciliation

Kameshtashtan, a Mushuau Innu landscape

Kameshtashtan, a cultural landscape in northern Labrador, represents the profound importance of Nitassinan, the Innu homeland, to the Mushuau Innu and their way of life. Tied to oral histories, legends and spiritual meanings, it holds places of births and deaths and campsites at least 6,500 years old, and reflects the Mushuau Innu’s migratory life with Atiku, the caribou.

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Photo: NASA Earth Observatory · Photo licence: Public domain · Credit & context