Experience the best of Winnipeg

Winnipeg sits on the flat prairie of southern Manitoba, at The Forks, where the Red and Assiniboine rivers join. People have gathered at the meeting place for thousands of years, and today it holds a market, riverside paths, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, whose glass-and-stone tower is visible across the city.

The Exchange District preserves rows of early twentieth-century warehouses and offices of stone and terracotta, now home to theatres, galleries and cafés. St Boniface, the city's French-speaking quarter across the Red River, has a cathedral and the grave of Louis Riel, leader of the Métis. Assiniboine Park offers a zoo and conservatory, and the Manitoba Museum tells the story of the province.

Lake Winnipeg and its sandy beaches lie an hour or so to the north, and Gimli on its shore keeps the Icelandic heritage of settlers who arrived in the 1870s. Local tastes include pickerel, or walleye, from the lakes, perogies from the Ukrainian community and bannock. Winter is long and fiercely cold, with skating trails on the frozen rivers, and summer brings long, warm evenings.