Discover Vancouver

Museum of Anthroplogy

Located on the Point Grey cliffs, on the campus of the University of British Columbia, the Museum of Anthropology houses one of the world's finest displays of Northwest Coast First Nations art in a spectacular building overlooking mountains and sea. See poles, feast dishes, and canoes of the Kwakwaka'wakw, Nisga'a, Gitksan, Haida, Coast Salish, and other Northwest Coast peoples inside the soaring glass and concrete structure of the museum's Great Hall.

Much is made of the museum's award-winning layout, a cool and spacious collection of halls designed by Arthur Erickson. The huge Great Hall, inspired by native cedar houses, makes as perfect an artificial setting for its thirty-odd totem poles as you could ask for. Huge windows look out to more poles and Haida houses, which you're free to wander around, backed by Burrard Inlet and the Coast Mountain range. Most of the poles and monolithic carvings are taken from the coastal tribes of the Haida, Salish, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl, all of which share cultural elements. The suspicion - though it's never confessed - is that scholars really don't know terribly much of the arcane mythology behind the carvings, but the best guess as to their meaning is that the various animals correspond to different clans or the creatures after which the clans were named. To delve deeper into the complexities, it's worth joining an hour-long guided walk.

To get there by bus, catch the #10 or the #4 south from Granville and stay on to the end of the line. The campus is huge and disorienting - to find the museum, turn right from the bus stop, walk along the tree-lined East Mall to the very bottom (10 minutes), then turn left on NW Marine Drive and walk till you see the museum on the right (another 5 minutes). In the foyer pick up a free mini-guide or the larger booklet for $1 - a worthwhile investment, given the exhibits's almost total lack of labelling, but still pretty thin.

"Tourist Attraction of the Year - Canada" awarded by the Canadian Travel & Tourism Industry Awards.