British Columbia Guide

The often pristine scenery of British Columbia more than lives up to most people's image of the wilds of Canada. What may come as a surprise, however, is the region's sheer natural diversity: between the expected extremes of the mountainous, forested interior and the fjord-cut mountains of the coast lies a jigsaw of landscapes, including genteel farmland, ranching country, immense lakes and even a patch of genuine desert. British Columbia contains both Canada's wettest and its driest climates, and more species of flora and fauna than the rest of the country put together. The range of recreational possibilities is equally impressive: the country's biggest ski area, its warmest lakes and some of its best beaches are all here, not to mention hot springs and hiking, sailing and canoeing galore, as well as some of the best salmon fishing in the world. Interior towns may not always be terribly interesting – Nelson is a notable exception – but from almost anywhere in the region you can be sure that secluded and peaceful countryside and myriad outdoor pursuits lie just a few kilometres away.

Culturally and logistically, southern British Columbia stands apart from the northern half of the province, containing most of the roads, towns and accessible sights. Ninety-five percent of the population lives in the south, mainly in Vancouver, Canada's third largest city. A cosmopolitan, sophisticated and famously hedonistic place, Vancouver gives the lie to the stereotype of the Canadian west as an introverted, cultural wasteland, its combination of glittering skyline and generous open spaces standing as a model of urban planning. The province's modest capital is Victoria, a considerably smaller city on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, which affects a somewhat English ambience to lure more tourists than it probably deserves.

If you're making a circuit of the interior, or even just cutting across it as part of a transcontinental route, you'll want to set aside time for the mountain-hemmed lakes and tidy mining towns of the Kootenays, or - if you're into wine tasting or rowdy lakeside resorts - the Okanagan. For big wilderness and waterfalls, Wells Gray Provincial Park stands out, though exhilarating hikes and camping are possible in dozens of other parks. And if you're looking to ski or snowboard, Whistler is one of the world's top resorts. Variety is also the byword for Vancouver Island, by far the largest of an archipelago of islets off BC's coast, where in a short time you can move from wild seascapes and rainforest to jagged, glaciated peaks. Vancouver Island can also be used as a springboard for the ferry up the famed Inside Passage to Prince Rupert and beyond, or the new Discovery Coast Passage to Bella Coola; inland, roads and rail lines converge to follow a single route north through the endless expanse of the Cariboo region of the interior plateau.

Long before the coming of Europeans, British Columbia's coastal region supported five key First Peoples - The Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Nuu-chah-nulth, Haida and Tlingit - all of whom lived largely off the sea and developed a culture in many ways more sophisticated than that of the nomadic and hunting-oriented tribes of the interior. Although it's rare these days to come across aboriginal faces in interior southern BC, aboriginal villages still exist on parts of Vancouver Island, and you can find examples of their totemic art in the excellent museum displays of Victoria and Vancouver.

The British explorer Francis Drake probably made the first sighting of the mainland by a European, during his round-the-world voyage of 1579. Spanish explorers sailing from California and Russians from Alaska explored the coast almost two centuries later, though it was another Briton, Captain Cook, who made the first recorded landing in 1778. Captain George Vancouver first mapped the area in 1792-94, hard on the heels of the Nuu-chah-nulth Convention of 1790 - a neat piece of colonial bluster in which the British wrested from the Spanish all rights on the mainland as far as Alaska.

While British Columbia no longer dithers over its destiny, it still tends to look to itself and the Northwest real estate - and increasingly to the new economic markets of the Pacific Rim - rather than to the rest of Canada. The francophone concerns of the east are virtually nonexistent here - for years, for example, there was just one French school in the entire province. For the most part British Columbians are well off, both financially and in terms of quality of life, and demographically the province is one of the region's youngest. If there are flies in the ointment, they're the environmental pressures thrown up by an economy which relies on primary resources for its dynamism: British Columbia supplies 25 percent of North America's commercial timber and exports significant amounts of hydroelectric power, fish, zinc, silver, oil, coal and gypsum. Few of these can be exploited without exacting a toll on the province's natural beauty; British Columbians may be well off, but they're increasingly aware of the environmental price being paid for their prosperity.