Toronto: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Toronto was founded as York in 1793 and the nickname it earned almost immediately was Muddy York, because the site was a swampy flat at the mouth of a creek and the streets were unpaved clay. In April 1813 an American force took the town and burned the parliament buildings, and the British burned Washington the following year partly in answer. Almost nothing from that period survives above ground, so this walk is the layer that replaced it — the Victorian and Edwardian city that got rich on banking, distilling and railways. Go on a weekday morning when the lobbies are open.

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A short history of Toronto

The name comes from the Mohawk language and probably means "the place where trees stand in the water". In 1793 Governor John Simcoe founded the town of York, the capital of Upper Canada. In 1813, during the war with the United States, the Americans captured the town and burned its parliament buildings. In 1834 it received city status and took back the name Toronto. After the Second World War immigrants arrived from all over the world, and today about half of its residents were born outside Canada. The CN Tower, 553 metres high, was completed in 1976.

The ten best sights in Toronto

1
Royal Ontario Museum
The largest museum in Canada; the 2007 crystal addition is still argued about and it is free to look at
2
Art Gallery of Ontario
Gehry rebuilt it in 2008 and he grew up two streets away; it is his only building in his home city
3
Aga Khan Museum
The only museum in North America dedicated to Islamic art; Maki, 2014, and the garden is free
4
Casa Loma
Built 1911–14 by a man who then lost everything; the city seized it for unpaid taxes in 1924
5
Spadina Museum
The house next door to Casa Loma, furnished exactly as it was in 1942 and far more interesting
6
Fort York
The Americans took the town in 1813; the retreating British blew up their own magazine as they left
7
Old City Hall
1899, and it was nearly demolished in the 1960s for a shopping centre; it is a courthouse now
8
Toronto City Hall
Won by a Finn in a 1958 competition with 520 entries from 42 countries; two curved towers of unequal height
9
Osgoode Hall
1832, and the law society’s own building; the iron gates are designed to keep cattle out
10
Ontario Legislative Building
1893 in pink sandstone; free tours, and the interior still has gas fittings beside the electric ones

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Tours in Toronto →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Toronto:

Free walking tours in Toronto

Muddy York

Fort York · On the twenty-seventh of April 1813 an American fleet landed and the small British garrison withdrew — but as they went they lit a slow fuse to their own powder magazine. It exploded as the Americans advanced over it, killing around two hundred and fifty of them including their commanding general. The Americans then burned the parliament buildings, and when the British burned Washington the next year they cited this. The fort now sits under a motorway with the lake half a kilometre away, because everything south of it is landfill.
St Lawrence Market · There has been a market on this block since 1803. The south building stands on the footprint of the first city hall of 1845, and when it was rebuilt in 2015 the excavation found the original council chamber floor, which is now displayed under glass inside. The sandwich the market is known for is peameal bacon — brined pork loin rolled in cornmeal, which is a Toronto invention and is called Canadian bacon everywhere else and is not the same thing.
The Gooderham Flatiron · Built in 1892 for the Gooderham distilling family and it predates the New York Flatiron by eleven years, though it is much smaller. The painted mural on the flat back wall is a trompe-l’oeil of windows with a curtain blowing out of one, done in 1980, and the reason it exists is that the blank wall was the only thing visible from the new financial district.
The PATH · Thirty kilometres of connected underground walkway under the financial district, with about twelve hundred shops, and Guinness lists it as the largest underground shopping complex in the world. It was not planned — individual building owners dug connections to their neighbours from the 1900s onwards and the city only began coordinating the signage in 1987. It exists because the city is at the latitude of Florence and gets the weather of Minsk.
Union Station · Finished in 1927 after fifteen years of building and twenty years of argument, and it carries more passengers than any other transport facility in Canada — about three hundred thousand a day. The Great Hall is twenty-seven metres high and the names carved around the frieze are the places the railway reached, running west to east, so you can read the geography of Canada round the room.
CN Tower · Five hundred and fifty-three metres, and it was the tallest free-standing structure in the world from 1975 until 2007. The reason it was built is unglamorous: the new downtown towers were blocking microwave and television signals, and the railway company needed an antenna above them. It is struck by lightning about seventy-five times a year and the copper strips that carry the charge to ground are visible on the shaft.

The market that changed hands five times

About half the people in Toronto were born outside Canada and more than two hundred languages are spoken here, and the way to see what that actually means is not a festival but a four-block market. Kensington was the Jewish market from about 1900, then Portuguese, then Caribbean, then East and South-East Asian, then Latin American, and each wave left its shops standing while the next one moved in around it. It is a National Historic Site for that reason rather than for any building. Go before eleven on a weekday, cash in hand.

Kensington Market · The houses here are Victorian workers’ cottages and the shops are their front gardens, built over by immigrant families who needed a shopfront and could not afford a commercial lease. That is why the market has no market building and no stalls — it is a residential street where every ground floor was converted. The Jewish community that built it in the 1900s called it the Jewish Market, and two of the original bakeries are still trading under later owners.
Spadina Chinatown · This is the second Chinatown. The first was east of here around Elizabeth Street, and in the 1950s and 1960s two thirds of it was expropriated and demolished to build the new City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square. The community moved west along Dundas to Spadina, which is why the Chinatown of a city this size sits on a six-lane streetcar route rather than in a quarter of its own.
Art Gallery of Ontario · Frank Gehry rebuilt it between 2004 and 2008, and this is the only building he has designed in the city he was born and raised in — he grew up two streets from the gallery on Beverley Street and his grandmother used to take him here. The result is unusually restrained for him: a wooden and glass facade along Dundas and a blue titanium box at the back, with a spiral staircase that goes through the roof.
Graffiti Alley · A kilometre of service laneway behind Queen West where painting is legal, and the arrangement is specific: the city created a Graffiti Management Plan in 2011 that distinguishes between vandalism, which it removes, and street art with the property owner’s consent, which it protects. Business owners apply to have their wall included. It changes every few weeks.
Queen Street West · Three kilometres of streetcar route that runs through four different economies in a row, and the Toronto detail is the streetcars themselves: this is the largest streetcar system in North America and one of the only ones never dismantled. When the city took the private railway into public ownership in 1921 the new commission kept the rails, and almost every other North American city sold theirs for scrap in the 1950s.
Trinity Bellwoods Park · The dip in the middle of the park is not landscaping — it is Garrison Creek, which still runs under it in a brick sewer built in the 1880s. Toronto buried about a dozen creeks this way and the city’s streets still bend around valleys that are no longer there. The park itself was the grounds of a university that moved out in 1925, and the stone and iron gates on Queen Street are all that is left of it.

The ravines and the islands

Toronto has about three hundred kilometres of wooded ravine inside the city, which is the largest ravine system of any city in the world, and the reason it is still empty is a disaster. In October 1954 Hurricane Hazel came up the lake and killed eighty-one people in and around Toronto, most of them when houses in the flood plains were swept away. The region responded by banning building in the valleys and buying out the land, and that single decision is why a city of three million has forest running through the middle of it. The islands are the other half of this story.

Evergreen Brick Works · A clay quarry that supplied the bricks for much of the city between 1889 and 1984, and the north wall of the pit is now a geology lesson: it exposes about a hundred and twenty thousand years of deposits, including a layer of plant and animal fossils from the Sangamonian interglacial, when this latitude was warmer than today and had different species. The fossils were found by quarry workers and the site is now a protected scientific reference section.
The Don Valley · The valley was cut by glacial meltwater about twelve thousand years ago, which is why it is far too large for the river in it. The lower Don was straightened into a canal in the 1880s and it is now being unbuilt: a project that began in 2018 is digging a new mouth and re-creating the marsh, partly to let the river flood where it used to. It is one of the largest urban river renaturalisations anywhere.
Riverdale Park East · The hill here is the east wall of the Don valley and it gives the best skyline view in the city for nothing. What stood at the bottom until 1977 was the Don Jail, a notorious nineteenth-century prison where the last two executions in Canada were carried out in 1962 — a double hanging. The building survives and is now a hospital administration block.
Ward’s Island · About seven hundred people live on two of the islands with no cars, and they nearly lost it: the city voted to clear the community for parkland in 1956 and spent thirty-five years trying, demolishing houses as leases expired. The residents fought it in court and in the press and finally in the legislature, and on the fifteenth of December 1993 Ontario passed an act giving them a ninety-nine-year lease through to 2092.
Gibraltar Point Lighthouse · Built in 1808 and the oldest building in Toronto still standing on its original site, which is itself odd — when it was built the islands were a peninsula and the lighthouse was at the end of it; a storm in 1858 cut a channel and made them islands, and the shoreline has moved so far that the lighthouse is now a hundred metres inland. Its first keeper disappeared in 1815 and was never found.
Hanlan’s Point · There was a baseball stadium on this point, and on the fifth of September 1914 a nineteen-year-old pitcher for the Providence Grays hit his first professional home run over the fence and into the lake. He was Babe Ruth. The stadium is gone, the beach is now one of very few legally clothing-optional beaches in Canada, and there is a plaque.

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Getting to Toronto and getting around

Pearson International Airport · Twenty kilometres west; the UP Express train reaches Union Station in twenty-five minutes
Billy Bishop City Airport · On an island in the harbour; a 120-second ferry or a tunnel, and it is a ten-minute walk downtown
Union Station · 1927, and the busiest transport hub in Canada; the Great Hall ceiling is twenty-seven metres up
Bloor-Yonge · Where the two subway lines cross; the busiest station in the country and the one to avoid at eight
The streetcars · The largest streetcar system in North America and one of the only ones never torn up
Jack Layton Ferry Terminal · Thirteen minutes to the islands; the last boat back from Ward’s Island is the one to check
The PATH · Thirty kilometres of underground walkway under downtown; it exists because of February

Cheap eats in Toronto

About half the people who live in Toronto were born in another country and more than two hundred languages are spoken here, and that is not a slogan — it is the entire explanation of the food. There is no Torontonian cuisine in the way there is a Bolognese or a Lyonnais one; what there is instead is the best Chinese, Sri Lankan, Ethiopian, Filipino, Caribbean, Portuguese, Korean and Afghan food in the country, usually in a strip mall and usually run by the family that brought it. Eight to twenty dollars, cards everywhere, and tipping is eighteen to twenty per cent.

The Jamaican patty · Three dollars, from a bakery window, and the Canadian government once tried to ban the name. Verified 10/2026
Peameal bacon sandwich · Brined pork loin rolled in cornmeal, on a bun; eight dollars and it is a Toronto invention
Sri Lankan Scarborough · The largest Sri Lankan Tamil community outside South Asia; kottu roti and string hoppers, ten dollars
Hong Kong Chinese, Spadina · Barbecue ducks in the window and roast pork by weight; the queue at six in the evening is locals
Portuguese chicken, Little Portugal · Spatchcocked over charcoal with piri-piri, a whole bird for eighteen dollars; takeaway only at most
Gerrard Street South Asian · The largest South Asian marketplace in North America; chaat, sweets and sari shops for six blocks
Korean barbecue, Bloor Street · Six blocks west of Bathurst; the kitchens serve until two and the side dishes are free
Kensington Market taquerías · Baja-style fish tacos and carnitas from windows in converted house fronts; four dollars each
The Danforth, Greektown · Two kilometres of Greek restaurants; the street signs are bilingual and the patios run till late
Butter tart · A Canadian pastry that is not from anywhere else; the runny-versus-firm argument is taken seriously

Museums in Toronto

Toronto’s museums have one unusual feature: several of them are single-subject collections of a kind that barely exists elsewhere — a museum of shoes, a museum of ceramics, the only museum of Islamic art in North America, a hall of fame built inside a bank vault. The big two are the largest museum in Canada and a Gehry rebuild of the art gallery he grew up beside. Many have a free or reduced evening once a week and it is worth checking before you buy a ticket.

Royal Ontario Museum · The largest museum in Canada; the Chinese temple art and the Bronze Age galleries are the strength
Art Gallery of Ontario · Gehry’s only building in the city he grew up in; the Thomson collection of Canadian art is the core
Aga Khan Museum · The only museum in North America devoted to Islamic art; Fumihiko Maki, 2014, and the courtyard is free
Bata Shoe Museum · Thirteen thousand items over 4,500 years; it is a serious anthropology collection in disguise
Hockey Hall of Fame · In an 1885 Bank of Montreal building; the Stanley Cup sits in the original vault and you may touch it
Gardiner Museum · Ceramics only; pre-Columbian, Italian maiolica and English porcelain, and free on Wednesday evenings
Casa Loma · Ninety-eight rooms, built 1911 to 1914, and the owner lived in it for less than ten years
Spadina Museum · Next door to Casa Loma and the opposite of it: a real family house, frozen as it was in 1942

Holy places in Toronto

Toronto was a Protestant city so strict that it was called Toronto the Good, and the laws went further than anywhere comparable: until the 1950s you could not play organised sport in a public park on a Sunday, cinemas were closed, and the city did not permit Sunday shopping until 1992. The religious landscape now is the opposite — this is one of the most religiously diverse cities on earth, with the largest Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish populations in Canada all in the same metropolitan area. Most of the buildings below are free.

St James Cathedral · 1853, and its spire was the tallest in Canada for a century; the first three churches here all burned
Aga Khan Museum and park · The Ismaili Centre beside it is a working jamatkhana; the formal garden between them is free and open
Osgoode Hall · The iron gates have a double turn in them, and the reason is cattle, not security
Allan Gardens Conservatory · Free, every day of the year, and the 1910 Palm House dome is twelve metres high
Toronto the Good · Sunday shopping was illegal here until 1992, and taverns had to keep their windows blacked out
Kensington Market synagogues · Thirty synagogues stood in this district in the 1930s; two of the buildings survive in use
Fort York burial ground · The military cemetery holds the dead of 1813 from both sides, buried together without names
Hart House chapel · A 1919 university building with a chapel, a library and a gym; open to walk through on weekdays

Nature and day trips near Toronto

Toronto has the largest ravine system of any city in the world — about three hundred kilometres of wooded valley cutting through the built-up area — and the reason it is still forest rather than housing is Hurricane Hazel. In October 1954 the storm killed eighty-one people in and around the city, mostly when flood plain houses were swept away, and the response was to ban building in the valleys outright and expropriate the land. Everything green in this city follows from that one decision. All of it is free and most of it is reachable by subway.

The ravine system · About 300 kilometres and 11,000 hectares inside the city; the largest of any city in the world
High Park · 400 hectares, and a third of it is black oak savannah — one of the rarest habitats in Canada
Toronto Islands · A storm cut them from the mainland in 1858; no private cars are allowed on any of them
Tommy Thompson Park · A five-kilometre peninsula built from construction rubble that became a major bird colony by accident
Scarborough Bluffs · Ninety metres of exposed glacial lake sediment over fifteen kilometres; the beaches below are landfill
Rouge National Urban Park · The first national urban park in Canada, 79 square kilometres, with working farms inside it
Evergreen Brick Works · The quarry floor is now a wetland and the pit wall is a protected geological reference section
Trinity Bellwoods · Garrison Creek still runs under it in an 1880s brick sewer; the dip in the lawn is the old valley

Things to do in Toronto with kids

Toronto is straightforward with children for one reason that matters more than any attraction: the islands. A thirteen-minute ferry gets you to a car-free island with a beach, a small amusement park, a boardwalk and a petting farm, and the whole thing is one decision rather than six. In winter the city moves indoors and the free conservatory, the aquarium and the science centre are what local families do. Transit is free for children twelve and under on the subway and streetcars.

Centreville, Centre Island · A small 1967 amusement park aimed at under-twelves; a 1907 carousel and a working farm beside it
Ripley’s Aquarium · The shark tunnel and a touch pool with rays; busiest between eleven and three, so go at opening
Ontario Science Centre · The 1969 Moriyama building closed in 2024 over its roof and the collection is relocating — check before going
Allan Gardens Conservatory · Free, warm and open every day; this is the February answer and there is a fish pond inside
Toronto Zoo · 287 hectares in a river valley; there is a free shuttle train inside and you will need it
High Park zoo · Free, small, and it has bison; the park also has a free children’s train in summer
Hockey Hall of Fame · There is a shooting and goaltending area children can use, and the real Stanley Cup to touch
Riverdale Farm · A free working farm inside the city on the site of the old zoo; pigs, horses and no admission

Nightlife in Toronto

Toronto’s live music history is specific and it survives in the rooms: the Horseshoe Tavern has been booking bands since 1947, Massey Hall has the best acoustics in the country, and the El Mocambo is where the Rolling Stones played two secret shows in 1977 under a false band name. Last call is two in the morning across Ontario. The districts worth choosing between are Queen West and Ossington for bars, the Danforth and Little Italy for patios, and Kensington for anything cheap.

Horseshoe Tavern · Booking live music since 1947 in the same room; the Rolling Stones and the Police both played here
El Mocambo · The Rolling Stones played two unannounced shows here in March 1977 billed as a different band
Massey Hall · 1894, and Neil Young’s 1971 recording here is the standard evidence for its acoustics
Ossington Avenue · Four blocks of bars in what were car repair shops; the city capped new licences here in 2014
Second City · The Toronto branch opened in 1973 and produced most of a generation of Canadian comedy
Danforth Music Hall · A 1919 cinema turned concert hall; fourteen hundred seats and the sightlines are from a film audience

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Frequently asked questions about Toronto

What is there to see in Toronto?

The top sights in Toronto are Royal Ontario Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario and Aga Khan Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Toronto?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Toronto without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Toronto?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Toronto, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Muddy York.

How do you get to Toronto and get around?

The main ways are Pearson International Airport, Billy Bishop City Airport and Union Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Toronto, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Toronto that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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