Things to do in Winnipeg

Landmark · Downtown, where the Red meets the Assiniboine

The confluence of two rivers that has been a meeting and trading place for around six thousand years, now a market hall, a riverside park and the centre of the city's public life.

Local tip: In winter the frozen rivers are cleared into the Nestaweya River Trail, a skating and walking route running kilometres out from the market — at times the longest naturally frozen skating trail anywhere — with warming huts commissioned from architects and designers each year. It is the single best argument for a Winnipeg winter.

Neighborhood · North of Portage, downtown

Twenty blocks of turn-of-the-century warehouses in terracotta and cut stone, a National Historic Site, and the densest concentration of that architecture in North America.

Local tip: Film crews use it constantly as a stand-in for 1920s New York and Chicago, so do not be surprised by period cars on the street. It is liveliest for the summer festivals at Old Market Square and genuinely quiet on a winter weeknight — check it at both before deciding to live there.

Culture · The Forks

The first national museum built outside the National Capital Region — Antoine Predock's stone-and-glass building with alabaster ramps spiralling up to a glass Tower of Hope.

Local tip: Do the ramps upward as intended rather than taking the lift; the whole building is an argument made in architecture and it only works in sequence. Check the museum's reduced-admission evening before paying full price.

Nature · West end, on the river

A large Victorian park with an English garden, a conservatory called The Leaf, and a polar bear habitat you view from underwater tunnels.

Local tip: Journey to Churchill houses bears rescued from Manitoba's north rather than bred in captivity, and the underwater viewing is genuinely startling. Go on a weekday morning; the weekend queue for The Leaf's biomes is the real bottleneck.

Neighborhood · East across the Red River

The largest francophone community in Western Canada — the cathedral's burnt facade standing around a modern church, Louis Riel's grave, and a distinct civic identity that predates Winnipeg.

Local tip: Cross on the Esplanade Riel footbridge rather than driving. Come in February for Festival du Voyageur, ten days of fur-trade-era music, snow sculpture and caribou in a heated tent — the reason the worst month here is also the best one.

Culture · Downtown, Memorial Boulevard

A glass vault holding the world's largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art, visible from the street and three storeys tall, attached to the older gallery.

Local tip: The visible vault is the point — thousands of carvings stacked and lit behind glass, which you can see from the pavement without paying. Almost nobody outside Manitoba knows this collection is here, and it is world-class.