Cool Facts You Might Not Know About 20 Canadian Landmarks

The CN Tower may not be the world’s highest free-standing tower anymore, but its EdgeWalk is the world’s highest full-circle, hands-free walk; it has the world’s highest glass-floor elevator and the longest metal staircase and is home to the world’s highest revolving restaurant, wine cellar and bar. In spring and autumn, it uses decreased lighting so that it doesn’t interfere with bird migration.

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Parliament Hill is an architectural and artistic treasure trove. While the daily Changing of the Guard is probably the better-known event here, nearly every day at noon there is a free concert at the Peace Tower where you can try to identify the songs played by the 53 bells of the carillon.

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The Rideau Canal that links the cities of Ottawa and Kingston is the oldest continuously operated canal in North America. It was originally built as a safety measure in case of war with the United States and each lock, with gates made of Douglas fir, is unique. In winter, the Ottawa section becomes the world’s largest skating rink.

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On the Canadian side of the Niagara Falls, there are tunnels that lead to observation rooms where you can see the falls from behind. The green colour of the water is a result of dissolved salts and finely ground rock caused by erosion.

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Whenever a Pope dies, the normally white lights on the cross on Mount Royal are changed to purple. Before the wonders of computer-controlled fibre-optic lighting, workers had to climb up and change each bulb by hand. The steel cross was erected in 1924 but originally there was a wooden one erected in 1643.

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The giant castle that dominates the Quebec City skyline, the Château Frontenac, opened in 1893 as one of Canada’s grand railway hotels and still operates as a luxury hotel. The chef here has a rooftop garden where four hives are home to 70,000 honeybees.

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At low tide, you can walk on what is essentially the ocean floor and see the distinctive shapes of the Hopewell Rocks from the base up. At high tide, though, the lowest visible points above the water level can be more than 16 m higher up than where you stood six hours earlier. The Bay of Fundy has the world’s highest tides.

At high tide, tidal action that originates in the Southern Indian Ocean and travels around the southern tip of Africa all the way to the Bay of Fundy pushes the water of the St. John River back inland, causing a series of rapids to flow backwards. A new skywalk from which to view this phenomenon is expected to open later this year.

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At 12.9 km, the two-lane Confederation Bridge that links New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island is the longest bridge in the world to cross ice-covered water. Most of this award-winning marvel of engineering is 40 m above water.

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If you grew up watching Theodore Tugboat, the Town Clock in Halifax will look familiar to you, since it was the inspiration for Chimey the Clock Tower. Found in the Halifax Citadel National Historic Site, the real Town Clock was commissioned by punctuality-obsessed Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and father of Queen Victoria, and has been keeping time since 1803.

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Locals used to call it the “old Indian camp” but when archaeologists started excavating a group of mounds outside the fishing hamlet of L’Anse aux Meadows, instead of only First Nations artifacts they found that the old Icelandic sagas were telling the truth about Vikings visiting North America.

The Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows existed about 500 years before Columbus reached the Americas.

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One of the coolest chase scenes in a James Bond movie was the opening sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me, showing 007 escaping the villains on skis and then base-jumping off a cliff. Even though the scene was set in the Alps, the flat-topped mountain used as the filming location was one of the twin peaks of Mount Asgard on Baffin Island.

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The building cornerstone of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights comes from the ruins of St. Mary’s Priory in Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was approved. There are also medicine bags built into the foundations of this architectural masterpiece to show respect for the Earth.

Mac the Moose is the largest moose in North America and, until 2015, was the largest in the world. He’s made of cement over a metal frame and stands 9.8 m tall in his hooves.

Virginia Falls is one of the most dramatic sights in the spectacularly scenic Nahanni National Park Reserve. It’s more than double the height of Niagara Falls and because of the mist, rare orchids grow near the falls.

Covering about 260 hectares, the Carcross Desert is said to be the smallest desert in the world. It’s not actually a true desert but a series of dunes formed by sand blown from Bennett Lake. Naturally you can go sandboarding here.

About 6,000 years ago, long before the existence of sites like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza, First Nations people were already using the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump to hunt bison. Young men known as buffalo runners would dress up as animals and lure the bison over the cliff.

Picture-perfect Lake Louise gets its emerald colour from rock flour that is carried down by melt-water from the surrounding glaciers. It’s named after Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, but the Nakoda or Stoney First Nation people call it the Lake of the Little Fishes.

At its narrowest point, less than a metre wide, Fan Tan Alley is Canada’s narrowest street. It’s named after a Chinese gambling game and is located in the country’s oldest Chinatown, in Victoria.

Back in the day, this was a popular hang-out for producers and smokers of opium, which was legal in Canada until 1908.

Today the Lions Gate Bridge is one of Vancouver’s most famous landmarks but there was much opposition when it was being built, with many people fearing it would ruin Stanley Park. A not-so-cool fact about the bridge is that a bylaw stipulated that no people of Asian descent could be involved in its construction.