Things to do in downtown Vancouver

Let's start on Granville Street, where some of the oldest spots are underground. Commodore Lanes has bowled in a basement at 838 Granville since 1930, which makes it Canada's oldest bowling alley, with twelve five-pin lanes, twenty billiard tables and exactly one foosball table ($12 to $22 a person). At 868, the Commodore Ballroom has thrown parties since 1929 on a dance floor sprung with tires and horsehair. At 855, The Rec Room keeps things simple: 80-plus arcade games, mini golf and AR axe throwing over three floors.

A few buildings here used to do something else. The Vancouver Art Gallery hangs the world's largest Emily Carr collection inside a former courthouse ($29 to $35, closed Tuesdays, open until 8pm on Fridays), and Emily Carr: That Green Ideal, the biggest Carr exhibition in more than two decades, runs until November 8, 2026. If you've been meaning to go, this is the one we'd make time for. The Bill Reid Gallery on Hornby puts the Haida master goldsmith's jewellery in cases you can lean right into ($15). And the Central Library's best spot isn't a reading room. It's a free rooftop garden on Level 9, where, unusually for a library, food and drink are allowed.

The Coal Harbour seawall is the easy, open-air part of downtown: roughly two flat, free kilometres from Jack Poole Plaza and the 2010 Olympic cauldron toward Stanley Park, past Douglas Coupland's Digital Orca, a pixelated whale leaping out of the pavement. It's the walk we'd suggest when neither of you can decide what to do. The floatplanes landing alongside take passengers too: Harbour Air's Classic Panorama lifts off from 1055 Canada Place and climbs over Lions Gate Bridge and Stanley Park, from $149. Our Coal Harbour guide covers the waterfront from the seawall to the tasting menus.

At Canada Place, FlyOver hangs your feet over a 20-metre dome and flies you coast to coast, wind, mist and pine scent included, in about eight minutes ($29 to $40, daily 10am to 8pm). Willow Stream Spa takes up the entire fifth floor of the Fairmont Pacific Rim, with a mineral bath, a eucalyptus steam room and a cedar sauna ($109 for 90 minutes of facility access for non-hotel guests, Monday to Thursday). And 553 feet up Harbour Centre, Top of Vancouver turns a full circle every hour, so a two-hour dinner there is technically two laps of the city.

Granville Street is the city's nightlife hub, and in the 1950s it had one of the world's highest concentrations of neon signs. The grown-up bars around it go the other way on lighting: low and warm, and three of them are inside hotels. Prophecy, beneath the Rosewood Hotel Georgia, was named Canada's best new bar in 2025 and pairs live jazz with a cocktail list named for literary and musical icons, until 2am on Fridays and Saturdays. Bacchus in the Wedgewood Hotel has live piano Wednesday to Saturday and takes no reservations, so the seat by the piano goes to whoever gets there first. Uva pours until 2am every night off the lobby of the heritage Moda Hotel, and Frankie's near Beatty and Robson runs late jazz sets until 12:30am, Thursday to Saturday.

East of the core, the entrances get stranger, and we think that's half the fun. In Gastown you reach Arcana, a tarot-themed cocktail lounge, through a pet psychic's storefront. In Chinatown you reach Laowai, reservations only, by punching a code into the fridge door at the back of a dumpling shop, and at Bagheera you place a bet on King Louie at the counter of a fake betting shop until a wall opens onto a 45-foot jungle mural. Guilt & Co in Gastown is more straightforward: a sandwich board on Alexander Street and a flight of stairs down to a brick-arched basement with two live acts a night.

Plenty of this guide involves cocktails, so the family version of downtown heads outdoors, mostly into Stanley Park: the flat seawall, the 1920 rose garden, which peaks at 3,500 blooms in late June and is free year-round, and a picnic on the Ceperley lawn at Second Beach. The lawn rolls straight down to the sand, so the sun sets right in front of your sandwich.

Indoors, the Vancouver Aquarium has jellyfish, sea otters and a 4D theatre (last entry 3:30pm), and the Vancouver Art Gallery has a child rate for ages 12 and under. In Yaletown, the free Engine 374 Pavilion at Davie and Pacific has the engine that pulled the first transcontinental passenger train into Vancouver on May 23, 1887. Off-season hours aren't posted, so call 604-713-1800 ext. 1 first. The Robson Square rink plans to reopen in December 2026, and last season skating was free, with rentals extra.