VICTORIA has a lot to live up to. Leading US travel magazine Condé Nast Traveler has voted it one of the world's top-ten cities to visit, and world number one for ambience and environment. And it's not named after a queen and an era for nothing. Victoria has gone to town in serving up lashings of fake Victoriana and chintzy commercialism - tearooms, Union Jacks, bagpipers, pubs and ersatz echoes of empire confront you at every turn.

Much of the waterfront area has an undeniably quaint and likeable English feel - "Brighton Pavilion with the Himalayas for a backdrop", as Kipling remarked - and Victoria has more British-born residents than anywhere in Canada, but its tourist potential is exploited chiefly for American visitors who make the short sea journey from across the border.

Despite the seasonal influx, and the sometimes atrociously tacky attractions designed to part tourists from their money, it's a small, relaxed and pleasantly sophisticated place, worth lingering in if only for its inspirational museum. It's also rather genteel in parts, something underlined by the number of gardens around the place and some nine hundred hanging baskets that adorn much of the downtown area during the summer.

Though often damp, the weather here is extremely mild: Victoria's meteorological station has the distinction of being the only one in Canada to record a winter in which the temperature never fell below freezing.

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