VISIT CANADA-2

 

Brief History of Victoria—Extracted from Wikipedia

Province of British Columbia Vancouver Island

The Spanish and British took up the exploration of the northwest coast of North America beginning with the voyage of Captain James Cook in 1776, although the Victoria area of the Strait of Juan de Fuca was not penetrated until 1791. Erected in 1843 as a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, and known briefly as "Fort Albert", the settlement was later christened Fort Victoria, in honour of Queen Victoria. When the crown Colony of Vancouver Island was established in 1849, a town was laid out on the site and made the capital of the colony.

With the discovery of gold on the British Columbia mainland in 1858, Victoria became the port, supply base, and outfitting centre for miners, mushrooming from a population of 300 to over 5000 literally within a few days. In 1866 when the island was politically united with the mainland, Victoria remained the capital of the new united colony and became the provincial capital when British Columbia joined the Canadian Confederation in 1871. Victoria was incorporated as a city in 1862. In 1865, Esquimalt, located to Victoria’s East, was made the North Pacific home of the Royal Navy, and remains Canada's west coast naval base.

In 1886, with the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway terminus on the west coast of the mainland British Columbia, Victoria's position as the commercial centre of British Columbia was irrevocably lost to the City of Vancouver.(Please note that the City of Vancouver is situated on the west coastline of the mainland British Columbia and is NOT a part of Vancouver Island). Victoria subsequently began cultivating an image of genteel civility within its natural setting, an image aided by the impressions of visitors such as Rudyard Kipling, the opening of the popular Butchart Gardens in 1904 and the construction of the Empress Hotel by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1908. A real estate and development boom ended just before World War I, leaving Victoria with a large stock of Edwardian public, commercial and residential structures that have greatly contributed to the City's character.

It was Kipling who, after visiting Victoria, called it a Little Bit of Old England and remarked, “Amongst all the beautiful places in the world, and I think I have seen the most beautiful of them, Victoria ranks the highest.”