Top 15 Places to Visit in Canada

Canada is a country chock-full of natural sites and urban delights, where visitors are equally as wowed by the wildlife and wilderness, as they are by the cultural and culinary offerings found in the cities that speckle the sprawling nation.

Peruse for polar bears on the open arctic tundra of Churchill or cruise Vancouver’s curvy coastline in a canoe while gawking at the city skyline. Feast on five-star fusion cuisine in Toronto, or take in a street-side jazz jam session in Montreal.

Whether you’re a first-time visitor or returning to experience something new, these are the 15 best places to see in Canada. But be sure to plan ahead, because as the world’s second-largest country, you just won’t be able to do it all in one trip.
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Get your thrills with outdoor adventures in the mountains © iStock / Getty Images

1. The Canadian Rockies
Best for mountain views

The sawtooth, white-topped mountains straddling the British Columbia–Alberta border inspire both awe and action. Five national parks – Banff, Yoho, Kootenay, Waterton Lakes and Jasper – offer countless opportunities to delve into the lush wilderness, with ribbons of hiking trails, rushing white water and powdery ski slopes to satisfy travelers looking for mountain thrills.

This is one of the best places to visit in Canada in the winter, but outdoor adventures are aplenty during the summer months too.

2. Vancouver
Best for combining city and nature

3. Niagara Falls
Best for an iconic travel experience

4. Whistler
Best place to ski in Canada

5. Montréal Jazz Festival
Best place for music lovers

6. Old Québec City
Best place to visit in Canada for couples

7. Toronto
Best for multicultural experiences

8. Vancouver Island
Best for nature lovers

9. Rideau Canal
Best for ice skating

10. Manitoulin Island
Best place in Canada to celebrate First Nations culture

11. The Prairies
Best place for road trips

12. Bay of Fundy
Best place to spot whales

13. Drumheller
Best for dinosaur lovers

14. Churchill
The best place for polar bear encounters

15. Baffin
Best for Inuit art and incredible landscapes

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Einstein Proven Right Again!

Researchers have conducted a 16-year long experiment to challenge Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The international team looked to the stars — a pair of extreme stars called pulsars to be precise – through seven radio telescopes across the globe. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy

The theory of general relativity passes a range of precise tests set by pair of extreme stars.

More than 100 years after Albert Einstein presented his theory of gravity, scientists around the world continue their efforts to find flaws in general relativity. The observation of any deviation from General Relativity would constitute a major discovery that would open a window on new physics beyond our current theoretical understanding of the Universe.

The research team’s leader, Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, says: “We studied a system of compact stars that is an unrivaled laboratory to test gravity theories in the presence of very strong gravitational fields. To our delight we were able to test a cornerstone of Einstein’s theory, the energy carried by gravitational waves, with a precision that is 25 times better than with the Nobel-Prize winning Hulse-Taylor pulsar, and 1000 times better than currently possible with gravitational wave detectors.” He explains that the observations are not only in agreement with the theory, “but we were also able to see effects that could not be studied before”.

Ingrid Stairs from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver gives an example: “We follow the propagation of radio photons emitted from a cosmic lighthouse, a pulsar, and track their motion in the strong gravitational field of a companion pulsar.

We see for the first time how the light is not only delayed due to a strong curvature of spacetime around the companion, but also that the light is deflected by a small angle of 0.04 degrees that we can detect. Never before has such an experiment been conducted at such a high spacetime curvature.”

Dance of pulsars. Animation of the double pulsar system PSR J0737-3039 A/B and its line of sight from Earth. The system — consisting of two active radio pulsars — is “edge-on” as seen from Earth, which means that the inclination of the orbital plane relative to our line of sight is only about 0.6 degrees.

This cosmic laboratory known as the “Double Pulsar” was discovered by members of the team in 2003. It consists of two radio pulsars which orbit each other in just 147 min with velocities of about 1 million km/h. One pulsar is spinning very fast, about 44 times a second. The companion is young and has a rotation period of 2.8 seconds. It is their motion around each other which can be used as a near perfect gravity laboratory.  READ MORE...