Victoria, BC Webcam Live
Two live views of the Inner Harbour and downtown Victoria, British Columbia's capital, named after Queen Victoria and built by the Hudson's Bay Company. Live 24/7.
Two live views of British Columbia's capital
Two YouTube live streams cover different views of Victoria, the historic capital of British Columbia on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.
Victoria — a fur trading post that became Canada's most British city
Victoria began in 1843 as Fort Victoria, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post built by James Douglas on the orders of the company's governor, who feared the United States might annex the Columbia River region and wanted a secure foothold further north. The fort, first named Camosun after the Lekwungen word for "rush of water," was renamed in honour of Queen Victoria that same year. When Vancouver Island became a British crown colony in 1849, the small trading post was made its capital — a status Victoria retained through the colony's 1866 merger with mainland British Columbia, and again when the united colony joined Canadian Confederation as a province in 1871.
The city's most recognisable buildings both came from the same hand: architect Francis Rattenbury, still young when he won the commission, designed the British Columbia Parliament Buildings, completed in 1897 to replace an earlier structure nicknamed "the Birdcages," and followed it with the Fairmont Empress hotel in 1908, commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway. Both still anchor the Inner Harbour today, alongside Canada's oldest Chinatown, the second-oldest in North America after San Francisco's.
What the two cameras show
Victoria Live
YouTube Live · Victoria, BCLive stream over Victoria, British Columbia's historic capital on southern Vancouver Island.
Watch live →Victoria Live
YouTube Live · Victoria, BCA second live stream covering a further view of Victoria.
Watch live →Not far from downtown, an exhausted limestone quarry belonging to cement manufacturer Robert Butchart sat as an industrial scar on the landscape until 1904, when his wife Jennie began planting a sunken garden in the depleted pit. What started as one woman's private project grew into Butchart Gardens, now one of the most visited attractions on Vancouver Island — proof that Victoria's genteel reputation was built as much on rehabilitated industry as on colonial architecture.
Victoria beyond the webcams
Parliament Buildings: Francis Rattenbury's 1897 landmark, its domes illuminated nightly over the Inner Harbour.
Fairmont Empress: the 1908 chateau-style hotel famous for its afternoon tea service, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Chinatown: Canada's oldest, and the second-oldest in North America, dating to the Cariboo Gold Rush era.
A fur-trading outpost built to keep the Americans out ended up naming itself after a queen who never visited, then filled its harbour with buildings designed by a single young architect: Victoria's genteel image was assembled deliberately, piece by piece, by people who arrived to trade furs and stayed to build a capital.
When to watch
Inner Harbour, evening: for the Parliament Buildings' illuminated domes reflecting over the water after dusk.
Getting there: Victoria sits on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, about 100km southwest of Vancouver by ferry or air, British Columbia, Canada.
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