Summit the PKOLS (Mount Douglas) Lookout

A Douglas-fir ravine behind UVic with a creek, footbridges and, if local legend holds, actual magic in the spring water.

A 360-degree summit view ranked among Canada's most beautiful, and the whole trick is you drove here.

Victoria's Parliament Buildings flip on 3,000-plus light bulbs at dusk, and you get to just stand there with ice cream.

Two completely different waterscapes on one thin strip of sand, swans on one side, Olympics on the other, and it's free.

Free-roaming peacocks, ornamental ponds, stone bridges and a hilltop view of the Olympics, five minutes from downtown Victoria.

The sunset Victorians quietly beg you not to put on a list, from a 1914 observatory perch only locals know.

Ross Bay Cemetery holds 20,000 stories, Emily Carr, a herd of resident deer, and the ocean glinting over the wall.

A flat tidal-inlet path lined with century-old umbrella pines, rose gardens, and the ghost of a 1907 floating tearoom.

A cliff-edge gravel loop in Esquimalt with wind-shaped firs, a sneaky gravel cove and the Olympic Mountains straight ahead.

Victoria's most over-delivering sunset walk, from driftwood logs on the bluff to Clover Point's kite-filled sky.

A floating boardwalk into a city wetland ten minutes from downtown, where the turtles are sunning and the eagles are showing off.

Victoria's Lieutenant Governor opens 36 acres of roses, Garry oak meadows and an Olympic Mountains view to the public. Free.

An easy, gorgeous walk beside Butchart Gardens: a shaded descent through big cedars to the calm shore of Tod Inlet.

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