Tourist attractions in Toronto

Canadian National finished the tower on the old Railway Lands in 1976, and at 553.3 metres it held the record as the world's tallest free-standing structure for three decades. High-speed lifts reach the Main Observation Level, 346 metres up, in 58 seconds. One floor below, a two-tiered Glass Floor looks 342 metres straight down beside an outdoor terrace. The Top, 447 metres above the city, is still the highest observation platform in the Western Hemisphere, and EdgeWalk sends harnessed visitors around the outside of the main pod in season.

Architect: John Andrews

Location: 301 Front Street West, Toronto

Access: Ticketed, observation levels open 9:00 to 23:00 all year with last entry at 21:30

The financier Sir Henry Pellatt spent three years building himself a castle above Davenport Hill, and the architect E. J. Lennox finished it in 1914. Pellatt lost the fortune that paid for it within a decade and moved out, leaving Toronto with a Gothic Revival house of turrets, oak-panelled halls and a tunnel running under the lawn to the stables. The City of Toronto owns the estate today and runs it as a house museum, with a run of outdoor concerts in the terraced gardens through the summer.

Architect: E. J. Lennox · Style: Gothic Revival

Location: 1 Austin Terrace, midtown Toronto

Access: Ticketed, open daily 9:30 to 17:00

Canada's largest museum was established in 1912 and opened on Bloor Street in March 1914, and it now holds more than 18 million objects across some 40 galleries: dinosaur skeletons, minerals and meteorites on one side, African, Near Eastern and East Asian art on the other. Daniel Libeskind's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, a collision of angular glass and aluminium prisms, was grafted onto the old building in 2007 and gave it a new Bloor Street entrance. Museum subway station opens at the door, its platform dressed since 2008 to echo the collections above.

Location: 100 Queen's Park, at Bloor Street West and Avenue Road

Access: Ticketed, daily 10:00 to 17:30, and free for everyone on the third Tuesday night of the month from 16:00 to 20:30

A chain of car-free islands lies a 10 to 15 minute ferry ride off downtown, with three routes from the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal to Centre Island, Hanlan's Point and Ward's Island. The islands were a peninsula until a storm cut the channel in 1858; near Hanlan's Point, the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse of 1808 is the oldest on the Great Lakes. Centre Island holds Centreville, an amusement park in turn of the century style run by the Beasley family since 1967, plus beaches, bike rentals and the classic view of the skyline across the inner harbour.

Peninsula until: 1858 · Lighthouse: 1808

Location: Ferries from Jack Layton Ferry Terminal, 9 Queens Quay West

Access: Ferry ticketed; the islands are free to roam and Centreville rides are paid

Toronto's aquarium sits at the foot of the CN Tower and holds 5.7 million litres of water, more than 20,000 animals and over 450 species. Dangerous Lagoon is the reason most people come: a moving walkway carries visitors through a glass tunnel while sand tiger sharks, sawfish and green sea turtles swim overhead. The galleries around it work through Canadian lake and river habitats, Pacific kelp forests and tropical reefs, and the late closing hour leaves it one of the few big attractions downtown still open in the evening.

Location: 288 Bremner Boulevard, beside the CN Tower

Access: Ticketed, open daily 9:00 to 23:00

Gooderham and Worts have been on this ground since 1832, and their Victorian distillery survives as more than forty heritage buildings along ten lanes across thirteen acres, the largest collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. Parks Canada made it a National Historic Site in 1988. Cars have been kept out since the complex reopened as a cultural district, so the cobbles now carry galleries, studios, coffee roasters and the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, with buskers and seasonal markets filling the lanes between the old tank houses.

Location: 55 Mill Street, east of downtown Toronto

Access: Free to walk, open 364 days a year. Distillery District information

A proclamation set this block aside for a public market in 1803 and Torontonians have shopped here ever since. The South Market opened in 1902, built around the walls of a former city hall, and gathers more than sixty vendors of meat, fish, cheese, produce and baked goods under one roof, with the Market Gallery on the floor above. Across Front Street the rebuilt North Market held its first Saturday farmers' market in April 2025, and an antique market takes the same floor on Sundays.

Location: 92 to 95 Front Street East, Toronto

Access: Free to wander. South Market open Tuesday to Friday 9:00 to 19:00, Saturday 7:00 to 17:00 and Sunday 10:00 to 17:00, closed Monday. Market hours

The Stanley Cup sits in the Esso Great Hall, the 1885 Bank of Montreal banking room that the Hall moved into in June 1993 and that Brookfield Place was later built around. Founded in 1943 and in Toronto since 1958, the museum lines up trophies, sweaters, sticks and goalie masks below street level, replays the game's turning points on film, and lets visitors take shots at a simulated goaltender or mind the net themselves on a model rink.

Location: Brookfield Place, 30 Yonge Street, at Front Street

Access: Ticketed, daily 9:00 to 17:00 from late June to early September and 10:00 to 17:00 through the rest of the year

Viljo Revell's two curved towers went up in 1965 and the square in front of them takes the name of Nathan Phillips, the mayor behind the project. At 4.85 hectares it is the largest city square in Canada, and about 1.8 million people a year turn up for concerts, markets and civic ceremonies. The three-metre TORONTO sign stands beside the reflecting pool, Henry Moore's bronze Archer sits on the paving, and the Spirit Garden, an Indigenous cultural space built in answer to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is now open.

Architect: Viljo Revell

Location: 100 Queen Street West, Toronto

Access: Free at any hour, and the reflecting pool becomes a skating rink from November to March, with free drop-in sessions and skate rental on site. Square information

Billboard screens and LED walls wrap the plaza at Yonge and Dundas, which invites comparison with Times Square and Shibuya Crossing and looks onto Canada's first pedestrian scramble, crossed by more than 100,000 people a day. It opened in the early 2000s as Yonge-Dundas Square, and on 14 December 2023 Toronto City Council adopted the name Sankofa Square, put forward by a community advisory committee of Black and Indigenous leaders after a review of civic names tied to colonial figures. Hundreds of events a year fill it.

Location: 1 Dundas Street East, Toronto

Access: Free and open at all hours, run by a City of Toronto agency. Event calendar

Photo: "Sankofa Square" by Dillan Payne (CC BY-SA).

Sonja Bata started buying shoes in the 1940s, endowed a foundation for the collection in 1979 and opened a purpose-built museum for it in 1995, in a Raymond Moriyama building on the corner of Bloor and St George. More than 13,000 shoes and related objects reach back 4,500 years, the largest footwear collection in the world, and the permanent gallery runs alongside temporary exhibitions that read footwear as social history. St George station is a minute from the door.

Architect: Raymond Moriyama

Location: 327 Bloor Street West, at St George Street

Access: Ticketed Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 17:00 and Sunday 12:00 to 17:00, with free admission for everyone on Sundays

Photo: "Bata Shoe Museum" by Jim.henderson (CC BY).