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Victoria: Attractions Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
One of Canada's finest art museums, it provides a permanent collection of 15,000 objets d'art featuring art from Asia, Europe and North America with a natural primary emphasis on Canadian and Japanese work. Open seven days a week, the Gallery offers both a stable and
ever-changing exhibition. Craigdarroch Castle Rising 87 stairs up through the 4 1/2 stories, the Castle was designed by Portland, Oregon architect, Warren H. Williams who died only four months after construction began on the Castle. Built in the Romanesque / Chateauesque style popular among the very rich as an architectural style suitable to one's fortune, was successfully completed by his associate, Arthur L. Smith in 1890. Furnished lavishly in the 1890s–1900s period, the 39 rooms occupy over 20,000 square feet. The Entrance Hall and Dining Room are panelled with rich golden oak imported from Chicago. The Drawing Room features hand-painted and stencilled ceiling decoration with lions' heads, garlands, birds and bouquets. Its windows represent the largest and finest in-situ collection of residential stained glass in Canada. And the Castle's tower provides a panoramic view of Victoria and beyond. As fascinating as the castle is, it is all the more intriguing once one hears of the history of the Dunsmuir family: its rise from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of wealth and power in western North America and its ultimate tragic ending. Dunsmuir, the patriarch, died in April 1889, more than a year before the Castle was completed. After his death, his sons, James and Alexander, assumed the melancholy task of finishing the Castle for their widowed mother. Later they sued their mother for her share of their father’s estate. Ten months after her death in 1908, Craigdarroch was sold and the contents were auctioned off. For sixty years, the Castle housed various public institutions including a WWI Military Hospital, Victoria College for twenty-five years and school board offices. The Castle is open to visitors year-round and often artisans can be found working on the continual restoration of this magnificent reminder of Victorian opulence. Located a short drive or a leisurely walk from the downtown harbour, just off Fort Street at 1050 Joan Crescent,
www.craigdarrochcastle.com Emily Carr House
Over the next 70 years, she expressed her pride in her part of Canada and her passion for nature through brush and pen. At seventeen, she traveled to San Francisco and later in Paris and London to study painting. In 1913, she returned to Victoria from which she undertook a series of adventures into the remote wilderness and visited isolated native villages, bringing back hundreds of sketches and water-colours from these journeys. When her health began to fail, she took to writing, eventually producing seven books based on her life. In 1941 she published her novel Klee Wyck which won the Governor's General's Award. She wrote several other best sellers, including The Book of Small and The Heart of a Peacock. Emily Carr died on March 2 1945 and was buried on the Carr Family plot at the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria. Emily Carr House, with an architectural style described as both "San
Francisco Victorian" and "English Gingerbread," was built in 1864. It
is the house Emile grew up in, with the same Victorian ambiance the
Carr family would have known in the 1870's with some their actual
possessions, including some of Emily's pottery and sculpture. Emily Carr House Helmcken House Helmcken House gives one the sense that the family may still live there. Crowded with many of their personal items, it offer such things as the doctor’s collection of antique medical instruments, reputed to be the largest collection in North America, reproductions of the family photo album, and a large number of personal letters. Dr. Helmcken’s bedroom sanctuary is in perfect condition feels lived in, as does the Dining Room with the family’s piano and the well-used card table. In the heart of downtown Victoria, surrounded by many other attractions, it serves as one of the best ways to get in touch with Victoria’s rich colonial history. Helmcken House
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The exterior of The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria suggests what
one can expect to find within. A curious melange of the past - an
historic 19th century mansion called Gyppeswick - and the present - a
modern addition housing contemporary exhibition spaces, it prepares
one for mixture of classic and modern art it offers inside. 
Craigdarroch Castle, a historic Victorian-era mansion, was built in
the 1890s by coal baron Robert Dunsmuir, the richest man in nineteenth
century British Columbia.
Emily Carr, one of Canada's greatest artists and most loved
authors, was born in Victoria in 1871, a few months after British
Columbia ended its term as a British colony and became a province of
this new country of Canada. 
Over 150 years ago, a young English doctor. John Sebastian Helmcken,
traveled from his home in England, around Cape Horn to the young
Hudson Bay Company Fort Victoria. As Victoria’s first academy-trained
doctor, he quickly became prominent in the small colony and his status
grew when he married the eldest daughter of Governor Sir James
Douglas. A surgeon by skill with the Hudson's Bay Company, he went on
to become a statesman and helped negotiate British Columbia's entrance
into confederation with the Dominion of Canada.
