Halifax

A star shaped British fort crowning the hill, guarded by soldiers in period uniform. Every day at noon a single cannon shot goes off, and the boom carries across all of downtown, startling first time listeners.

A timber boardwalk runs along the harbour past fish and chip stands and boat ticket booths. A sign beside the wave shaped sculpture tells everyone to stay off, and the children scramble over it anyway.

The pier shed where roughly a million immigrants stepped off ships onto Canadian soil between 1928 and 1971. Staff in the research room look up old passenger lists, so many visitors arrive with an ancestor's name in hand.

A museum showing a deck chair and carved wood pulled from the sea after the Titanic sank. A separate room covers the Halifax Explosion of December 1917, when a munitions ship collided in the harbour, and many visitors first grasp its scale here.

The resting place of 121 Titanic victims, their headstones set in rows that curve like a ship's bow. Since the film, flowers and tickets pile up at the "J. Dawson" stone, though he was in fact a coal trimmer in the engine room.

A fishing cove 45 minutes west by car, its white lighthouse standing on bare granite slabs. The wet rocks that look black are slick, and sudden big waves have swept people away, so signs warn visitors to keep off them.

A Victorian garden laid out in 1867, with ponds, flower beds and a bandstand inside iron railings. It closes for winter and opens from spring to late autumn only, and on summer Sunday afternoons the bandstand hosts concerts.

A wooded park over the peninsula's far southern end, where the round stone Prince of Wales Tower of 1796 still stands among the trees. Hurricane Juan knocked down most of the trees in 2003, so the forest today is regrowth from after the storm.

A harbour village whose brightly painted wooden streets are a UNESCO World Heritage site, slightly over an hour southwest by road. The schooner Bluenose II calls it home port, and on days she is docked visitors can go aboard.

Running across the harbour without a break since 1752, it is the oldest saltwater ferry service in North America. A city bus ticket covers it, and on the return from Dartmouth the deck takes in downtown Halifax with the fort on its hill.

A library opened in 2014, shaped like glass boxes stacked at offset angles. The rooftop terrace and cafe up top overlook Citadel Hill and toward the harbour.

The tiny house where folk painter Maud Lewis lived, its walls and doors covered in painted flowers, moved whole into the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. It is too small to enter, so visitors look in through the doorway.

A market whose roots are said to go back to 1750, among the oldest in North America, now housed in a harbourfront shed beside Pier 21. Saturday morning is when the most stalls are open.

An island guarding the harbour entrance with no bridge, reached only by boat in summer. Nineteenth-century fort ruins and forest trails remain, and with no shops anywhere on it, water and snacks have to come along.

Opened in 1750, the oldest Protestant church in Canada. A piece of wooden window frame blown from another building in the 1917 Halifax Explosion is still lodged in its wall, and a window said to show a human profile survives too.

A seaside village 1 hour southwest by car, where three churches line up together along the water. Lunenburg is a 15-minute drive away, so many visitors take in both villages in a day.

This museum, in a rebuilt church, stands on the site of Africville, a Black community the city demolished in the 1960s. The MacKay Bridge passes right overhead, and from the grass out front the view runs across the Bedford Basin narrows.