Seaside Mineral Pools at Oak Bay Beach Hotel

Willow Stream Spa inside the Fairmont Empress: fireplace, harbour view, two therapists, one mineral pool, zero reasons to care about the weather.

Oak Bay's beloved tearoom, two decades strong, where the Big Muckle Giant Tea for Two arrives in a tiered tower of house-baked scones and shortbread.

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

A downtown day spa where Ayurvedic massages have a near-cult following and a rainy afternoon becomes a whole personality.

A 1909 bank vault of a bookshop on Government Street, on every world's-best-bookshop list, and it costs nothing to wander.

Victoria's first board-game café, eight dollars buys you all night, a game guru, paninis, milkshakes, and at least one minor dispute.

Belly up to Chinatown's tea tasting bar, argue over blends, then disappear into a spa for two.

Greater Victoria's only aquarium packs 3,500 local sea creatures and a touch pool into one low-key Sidney afternoon, closed Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Canada's largest used bookstore, three floors and roughly a million books, best navigated with a five-dollar scavenger hunt and no agenda.

A 120-year-old garden in an old limestone quarry, where Jennie Butchart invented romance out of an industrial problem.

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

The Toptable group's Victoria showpiece: Japanese-style raw bar, West Coast plates, and the atrium is where the intimate seats live.

The quieter, candlelit alternative to the Empress: Victorian afternoon tea in an 1890s mansion, five minutes from the Inner Harbour.

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.