A couple of months ago blogger Elle McLean of These Boots Were Made for Traveling contributed a post to our blog. It was all about her home town of Calgary in the province of Alberta, Canada. Since reading it something about Calgary has stuck with us. Canada is a country we’ve not really explored a lot. However, it’s somewhere we love and hope to visit again soon.
As we’re not travelling internationally at the moment, it’s giving us plenty of time to research and plan future trips. Therefore, we’ve taken the opportunity to delve deep into what Calgary has to offer. This was to see whether or not it should be on our list of places to visit when we return to Canada. We can now categorically state – it’s a yes from us. Here are our reasons why we’d love to visit Calgary.
The Great Outdoors
Calgary is a city that encourages you to go outside and explore. Especially as it’s located at the foot of the breathtaking Canadian Rockies where the Bow and Elbow rivers meet. It appears you don’t have to travel far to experience great outdoor adventures, regardless of the time of year. These include hiking, swimming and of course camping.
Winter is actually a great time to visit Calgary. Especially if you love the great outdoors and winter sports. These include skiing, snowboarding, mountain boarding etc. You can find various places across the city and surrounding area to indulge in them. Also, did you know that Calgary was the first Canadian city to host the Winter Olympic Games back in 1988?
Calgary is also home to a number of green spaces and public parks. These include Heritage Park, Bowness Park and Prince Island’s Park, which is often compared to Central Park in New York. If you love to cycle, Calgary is a wonderful city to travel around by bike. Not only is it flat but it also has a great network of cycle paths. This makes exploring the city on two wheels not only fun but easy too.
Big City, Country Vibe
Calgary is the fourth largest city in Canada behind Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Therefore it has everything you’d expect from a large developed city. If big cities aren’t your thing, don’t let the fact that Calgary is one put you off paying a visit. This is because, in fact, Calgary has more of a country/friendly vibe. The main reason for this is because of its location in an area of foothills and prairie.
Some large cities are overdeveloped and overpopulated meaning they can be dirty and polluted. However, Calgary has officially been named the cleanest city in the world to live. With a population of over one million people, that’s a pretty impressive title to have and also a major reason why we’d love to visit Calgary. Green is good!
Calgary is a leader in many Canadian industries including the oil and gas industry. Agriculture, manufacturing and trade, amongst others, also make up Calgary’s economy. With many large companies opting to have their head offices in the city. Whether visiting, relocating or office moving Calgary is considered to be a growing city. It is becoming extremely popular to visit, live and work in.
Cool Attractions
When visiting any city, we always like to check out the top attractions. It seems that Calgary is not short of cool things to do. One of the most popular (and tallest) is the Calgary Tower. It was originally the Husky Tower when it first opened in 1967. The Tower has a viewing platform and a revolving restaurant 191 meters high. Therefore because of its height, it offers great views over the city and beyond to the mountains.
If you’re looking for something very unique then the Devonian Gardens is perfect. It is a large indoor park and botanical garden located on the 4th floor of the Core Shopping Centre. The gardens are home to a 900 sq. ft. living wall, fish ponds, fountains together with a children’s play area and not forgetting over 550 trees and 50 varieties of plants.
It would be remiss of us not to mention Calgary’s main attraction the annual Calgary Stampede which bills itself as “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth”. It’s one of Canada’s largest festivals. Questions have been asked for many years about animal cruelty aspects of the event. However, a lot of the myths about the rodeo have been debunked. Even though roughly 1.2 million people visit annually, we personally wouldn’t feel comfortable attending. Using animals for entertainment is just not our thing.
Arts and Culture
Another reason we’d love to visit Calgary is because of all the museums located throughout the city. The Glenbow Musem, which is the largest museum in Western Canada, is an art and history museum. It was founded in 1966 and houses nearly 30,000 pieces of artworks and artefacts together with a collection of gems and minerals. They include historic, modern and contemporary works.
Fort Calgary is a unique musuem to visit in the city. The fort was originally built in 1875 by the North West Mounted Police to control the illegal American whiskey trade. In 1978 it was opened as a historic site and musuem where you can learn about the formation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The musuem is open daily between 9.00am and 5.00pm.
If modern art is your thing, you do not have to visit a musuem to get your fix. Instead, all you have to do is visit the plaza located in front of The Bow, Encana’s Calgary head office. Here you will find Wonderland, the 12-metre-tall bent-wire sculpture of a young girl’s head that you can walk straight through by the world-renowned Spanish artist Jaume Plensa.
Have You Visited Calgary?
Of course, there are many other reasons why we’d love to visit Calgary including the relatively mild weather compared to other cities in Canada, the diverse and upcoming neighbourhoods and of course the eclectic dining scene across the city including Ethiopian, Vietnamese and Brazilian restaurants amongst many others. Have you ever visited Calgary, or maybe like Elle, it is your hometown too? If so we’d love all your recommendations or suggestions regarding what to see or do (or even eat) in the city.
- Collaborative Post
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