Mystic beach, southern Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island is the largest North American Island in the Pacific Ocean, stretching over 450 kilometres from the capital city of Victoria in the south to the rugged Cape Scott Provincial Park in the north.

Separated from the mainland of British Columbia by the Queen Charlotte, Georgia and Juan de Fuca Straits, the natural beauty and extensive wilderness of Vancouver Island sets it apart as the jewel of Canada and the Pacific Northwest.

The island boasts a magnificent chain of rugged, snowcapped mountains, laced with pristine lakes and rivers and pierced by a number of fjordic inlets on the Pacific Coast. This backbone mountain range, rising to 2,200 metres, effectively divides Vancouver Island into two distinct and vastly differing regions, with a dramatic effect on the climate.

Weather systems off the Pacific slam into the mountain barrier, rise, and release moisture on the west side of the mountains. The east coast is in the rainshadow of the mountains, and is drier to the extent that cactus can be found on some of the neighbouring Gulf Islands. The rugged west coast boasts dense, ancient rainforests and remote wind-battered shores, while the more forgiving lowlands of the east coast are more populated, with long stretches of beach, forests and provincial parks.

Totem Poles in the Cowichan Valley's City of Totems - Duncan, Vancouver Island

For thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans in 1778, the island was the home to the First Nations people. The Kwakiutl (the Kwakwaka'wakw today) lived in the north, the Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth) lived along the rainforests of the west coast, and the Coast Salish communities flourished on the south coast.

They lived off the lands and the ocean, drawing their every requirement from the substantial forests and the marine world cradling the island.

The Kwakiutl were the more artistic of the First Nations, producing magnificent totem poles and masks. The Nuu-chah-nulth were the mighty whalers, harpooning humpbacks and migrating gray whales, and the Coast Salish people harvested the lands, the reliable salmon runs and other bounty from the sea.

Today, Vancouver Island attracts millions of visitors annually, drawn by the magnificent scenery, in pursuit of fishing, hiking, camping, sea kayaking and other outdoor recreation, lured by the mountains, parks, and the sheltered waterways, lakes and rivers. Few tourist destinations in the world can match Vancouver Island for sheer beauty and diversity.