Cult Classics at Cinecenta

Victoria Film Festival's single-screen cinema on Douglas, where beer is served, most screenings are 19+, and the film has actual soul.

On the Sidney waterfront, the makers of colour-shifting Empress 1908 Gin hand you bitters and garnishes and let you play bartender.

A boutique downtown spa whose signature ritual ends in a 62-jet hydrotherapy tub, inside the Magnolia Hotel on Courtney Street.

A Turkish-craft studio on Broad Street where you press coloured glass into a lamp for a couple of hours, then take the glowing thing home.

Three heated adults-only mineral pools at the Boathouse Spa, a eucalyptus steam room, a stargazing sauna, and Mount Baker filling the horizon across the strait.

Emily Carr's 1864 yellow Italianate childhood home in James Bay, tours by donation, and Dallas Road is right down the street.

A coal baron built a 39-room sandstone castle, died before moving in, and accidentally created Victoria's best self-guided date.

A genuine 1908 castle with free Italian, Japanese and rose gardens, peacocks, and a film resume that includes Professor X's mansion.

Hold a tarantula at this tiny downtown menagerie of 50 species and discover exactly how brave your date actually is.

A 1890s Fernwood church turned theatre so intimate the actors skip the mics, and the pubs are right outside.

A woolly mammoth, a walkable old BC town you can actually wander through, and a First Peoples gallery that'll stop you cold.

A tunnel-like entrance on Broughton Street opens into a five-storey atrium with a mosaic-glass ceiling, and it costs nothing to stay.

More than 85 hand-built dioramas inside the Empress, featuring one of the world's largest model railways and zero self-consciousness.

Seven galleries, an 1889 mansion, twenty thousand works, and a Japanese garden with a real Shinto shrine waiting out back.