Things to See in Canada

Montréal's famous landmark, Notre-Dame Basilica, is a visually pleasing if slightly gaudy symphony of carved wood, paintings, gilded sculptures and stained glass windows. Built in 1829 on the site of an older and smaller church, it also sports a famous Casavant organ and the Gros Bourdon, said to be the biggest bell in North America.

A restored masterpiece, the Elgin & Winter Garden represents the last operating double-decker theatre in the world. In 1913 the breathtaking Winter Garden was built as the flagship for a vaudeville chain that never really took off, while the downstairs Elgin was converted into a movie house in the 1920s.

This standout museum in the park is really an art gallery. The worthwhile Musée du Québec houses the province's most important collection of Québecois art, as well as international paintings, sculptures and ceramics. The holdings include work by Riopelle, Borduas, Dallaire and Leduc.

Purported to be Canada's oldest museum, this entertaining and educational institution exhibits artefacts relating to French settlement and culture in the New World. It's not dry and employs some very creative, changing displays. The admission fee also covers some adjacent seminary buildings, with their religious artefacts, and quiet courtyards.

These thundering falls are one of Canada's top tourist destinations, drawing over 13 million people annually. Although hundreds of the world's waterfalls are actually taller than Niagara Falls, in terms of sheer volume, these are hard to beat: the equivalent of over a million bathtubs full of water goes over every minute.

This mesmerising complex is a legacy of the 1967 Olympic summer games. The one time velodrome has morphed into the Biôdome, a natural history museum with a twist: below the giant cupola are four beautifully re-created ecosystems, including a tropical forest and a polar world inhabited by playful penguins.

It all seems almost too surreal to be true, so picture perfect you'll think you're dreaming. Mountains scrape the sky - a jumble of colours and shapes. Cerulean blue meets snowcapped majesty. The sparkling lakes are emerald-green or milky-turquoise - you may have to blink a few times before your eyes can absorb their gloriously intense colours.

This sculpted garden was designed in collaboration with famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. It aims to express Bach's Suite No 1 for Unaccompanied Cello through landscape, with an arc-shaped grove of conifers, a swirling path through a wildflower meadow and a grass-stepped amphitheatre where free summer concerts are held.

Excellent resource for information about facilities for mobility-impaired travellers in Canada.

For details on quarantine and customs rules and regulations. CBSA offices are available all over Canada.