Tag: Winnipeg

Winnipeg is the city in the middle of the continent, the geographic centre of Canada, and, in most of the country’s imagination, a cold place that people fly over on the way to somewhere else. It is cold, in January. It is also one of the most surprising cities in Canada: a place where the Red and Assiniboine rivers have been a meeting point for six thousand years, where a national museum in a building of glass and Tyndall stone rises over that meeting point, where thirty blocks of terracotta warehouses from the 1900s boom survive intact as a film set for New York and Chicago, where the largest French-speaking community in western Canada keeps a winter festival of voyageur fiddling and maple taffy, where Filipino, Ukrainian, Mennonite, Métis and Indigenous cultures have all shaped what is on the plate, and where the Jets’ whiteout and the Blue Bombers’ banjo bowl are the city’s shared religion. It is friendly, affordable and unpretentious, and it rewards a first visit far beyond its reputation. This guide covers the sights, the neighbourhoods, the festivals, the food, the seasons, the day trips and the practical details.

If you are still comparing cheap flights to Winnipeg, read this alongside our guides to the best time to fly to Winnipeg and whether you need a car. Between the three you can plan the whole trip.

Winnipeg at a glance for first-timers

• Airport: Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International (YWG), about 10 km west of downtown, one of the most convenient big-city airports in Canada; a taxi takes 15 to 20 minutes, and a city bus runs to downtown. See our YWG airport guide.
• Getting around: downtown, The Forks, the Exchange District and Saint-Boniface across the footbridge are walkable; Winnipeg Transit’s buses cover the rest, with the Blue rapid-transit line to the university. A car is for Assiniboine Park in winter and the day trips.
• Money: Canadian dollars; Manitoba adds the 5 percent federal GST and a 7 percent provincial sales tax at the till. Tipping 15 to 20 percent in restaurants is customary.
• Weather: the most continental climate of any big Canadian city: long, very cold, sunny winters; short, hot summers; brief springs and falls; and mosquitoes in June and July. Our month-by-month guide has the detail.
• Where to stay: the Exchange District for the restaurants, galleries and the arena; downtown near The Forks for the museum and the rivers; Osborne Village or Corydon for a neighbourhood feel; the airport strip and Polo Park for value. Our Winnipeg hotel search covers them all.

The Forks

Start where the city started. The Forks, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers on the edge of downtown, has been a meeting and trading place for Indigenous peoples for six thousand years, then a fur-trade post, then a rail yard, and since the 1980s the city’s living room: the Forks Market, a pair of converted stables full of food stalls, a craft beer hall and local makers; the river walk and the docks, with river taxis in summer; the Oodena Celebration Circle, an earthwork amphitheatre aligned to the stars; the Children’s Museum in an old locomotive shed; the skateboard plaza; and the Esplanade Riel, the cable-stayed footbridge with a restaurant in the middle, which crosses the Red to Saint-Boniface. In winter, The Forks becomes the Arctic Glacier Winter Park: a skating trail down the frozen rivers that in a good year runs for kilometres and is one of the longest naturally frozen trails in the world, warming huts designed by architects from around the world in an annual competition, a toboggan run, and a beer garden on the ice. It is the city’s best free attraction in every season.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Rising over The Forks, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is the first national museum built outside the Ottawa region and, since it opened in 2014, the reason many people visit Winnipeg at all. The building alone is worth the trip: a mountain of Tyndall limestone wrapped in a glass “cloud”, with a spiral of glowing alabaster ramps that climb through the galleries to the Tower of Hope, 100 metres above the rivers with a view across the prairie. The galleries are serious and often moving, from the Holocaust and the Holodomor to Indigenous rights, residential schools and the civil rights movement, with a strong Canadian focus and a great deal for children to engage with. Allow at least three hours; the museum is closed on Mondays outside the summer.

The Exchange District

North of Portage and Main, the famous windswept intersection, the Exchange District is a National Historic Site of some thirty blocks of terracotta, brick and stone warehouses, banks and office buildings from Winnipeg’s boom years between 1880 and 1920, when it was the “Chicago of the North” and the grain capital of the British Empire. It survived intact because the boom ended, and it is now the city’s most interesting neighbourhood: the restaurants and cocktail bars that locals argue about, the galleries, the theatres, including the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and its Qaumajuq wing, which holds the world’s largest public collection of Inuit art in a luminous new building, and, in July, the Fringe Festival’s Old Market Square hub. It is also a working film set; the streets have stood in for Chicago, New York and Moscow. Walking tours run in summer, and the Manitoba Museum, with its full-size replica of the Nonsuch, the ketch whose 1668 voyage founded the Hudson’s Bay Company, and its planetarium, is on the district’s northern edge.

Saint-Boniface

Across the Esplanade Riel, Saint-Boniface is the historic French quarter, the largest francophone community in western Canada, and the birthplace of Louis Riel, the Métis leader whose grave is in the cathedral cemetery. The Saint-Boniface Cathedral, whose stone facade survived a 1968 fire and now frames a modern church built inside the ruins, is one of the most striking sights in the city; the Saint-Boniface Museum, in the oldest building in Winnipeg, a Grey Nuns convent from 1846, covers Riel and the Métis; and Provencher Boulevard has the French bakeries, bistros and the Franco-Manitoban cultural centre. In February, Whittier Park hosts the Festival du Voyageur, the largest winter festival in western Canada, ten days of fiddle music, snow sculptures, voyageur history, maple taffy on snow and a great deal of caribou, the spiced fortified wine.

Assiniboine Park and the zoo

West of downtown, Assiniboine Park is the city’s great park: the English garden and the Leo Mol sculpture garden, the Pavilion with its galleries of local art, the duck pond, the miniature railway, the Lyric Theatre’s free summer concerts and the new Leaf, a horticultural conservatory of tropical and Mediterranean biomes under a cable-net roof. The Assiniboine Park Zoo‘s Journey to Churchill exhibit is its star: polar bears, most of them orphaned cubs rescued from the Hudson Bay coast, swimming over a glass tunnel, plus muskoxen, wolves and Arctic foxes in a landscape designed to look like the tundra. It is the best zoo exhibit in Canada and the closest most visitors will get to Churchill’s bears. The park is a bus or a drive from downtown.

More museums and culture

The Royal Canadian Mint, on the eastern edge of the city, is where every Canadian circulation coin is made, along with coins for dozens of other countries, and the tour is a genuine surprise. The Manitoba Legislative Building, downtown, is a Beaux-Arts palace with the Golden Boy on its dome and a hidden programme of hermetic symbolism that a popular tour decodes. The Winnipeg Railway Museum, the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada beside the airport, the Fort Whyte Alive nature centre with its bison herd on the city’s southwestern edge, and the Dalnavert Victorian house museum round out the list. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Canada’s oldest, and the Winnipeg Symphony perform at the Centennial Concert Hall; for what is on during your dates, our Winnipeg events page lists concerts, shows and games.

Sports

The Winnipeg Jets play at the Canada Life Centre downtown, on the edge of the Exchange, and a Jets game, especially during a playoff whiteout when the whole arena and the streets outside dress in white, is the most Winnipeg thing a visitor can do. The Blue Bombers, the city’s Canadian football team and the most successful of the last decade, play at Princess Auto Stadium at the university from June to November, with the Banjo Bowl against Saskatchewan in September the loudest game of the season. The Winnipeg Goldeyes play independent-league baseball in a riverside ballpark at The Forks in summer, and Valour FC plays professional soccer at the stadium. See what is on sale in Winnipeg for your dates.

What to eat, and where

Winnipeg eats from everywhere its people came from. The city has the largest Filipino community in Canada per capita, and the lechon, pancit and halo-halo along the northwestern strips and in the food courts are among the best on the continent. The Ukrainian and Mennonite traditions put perogies, cabbage rolls, kubasa and farmer sausage on every diner menu and every church supper. The Métis and Indigenous food scene, with bannock, bison and wild rice, has moved from festivals to serious restaurants in the Exchange. The Jewish delis on the North End’s Main Street and Selkirk Avenue, the Vietnamese pho along Ellice and Sargent, the Italian strip on Corydon, and the Winnipeg goldeye, a smoked freshwater fish that is the city’s namesake delicacy, fill in the rest. The Forks Market is the place to graze; the Exchange District, Osborne Village, Corydon Avenue and Sherbrook Street are the places to sit down. The city’s other specialities are a cheese-stuffed “fat boy” burger with chili sauce, the honey dill sauce served with chicken fingers everywhere, and the “Winnipeg-style” rye bread that half the country ships in.

Festivals and events

Winnipeg keeps a full calendar and two of its festivals are national institutions. Folklorama, over two weeks in August, is the largest and longest-running multicultural festival in the world: forty-odd pavilions across the city, each run by a cultural community with food, dancing and music, visited by shuttle bus in the evenings. The Winnipeg Folk Festival, in July at Birds Hill Park north of the city, is one of the oldest and most loved in North America, with camping, a dozen stages and headliners far beyond folk. The Winnipeg Fringe, in July in the Exchange, is the second largest in North America after Edmonton’s. The Festival du Voyageur in February, the Jazz Winnipeg festival in June, the Manito Ahbee Indigenous festival in May, Pride in June, the Red River Exhibition fair in June, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival in September and Nuit Blanche in the Exchange in late September fill in the year. Tourism Winnipeg keeps the calendar.

Winnipeg through the seasons

Winter (November to March) is the reason for Winnipeg’s reputation and, handled right, one of the reasons to visit: the river skating trail and the warming huts at The Forks, the Festival du Voyageur, the Jets, the polar bears at the zoo, the northern lights on a clear night outside the city, and a city that has never pretended the cold is not there. It is very cold, regularly below -25 °C, and it is also dry and sunny. Spring (April to May) is short, muddy and, when the Red River floods, dramatic; it is the cheapest season. Summer (June to August) is hot, with long days, the Folk Festival, the Fringe, Folklorama, the Goldeyes at the ballpark, the patios on Corydon and in Osborne Village, and the beaches at Grand Beach on Lake Winnipeg an hour north. Fall (September to October) is brief and golden, with the Banjo Bowl, Nuit Blanche and the Jets’ season opening. Our month-by-month guide matches each season to fares.

Winnipeg with kids

The Forks was built for children: the Children’s Museum, the skate plaza, the river walk, the market’s food stalls, and in winter the skating trail, the toboggan run and the warming huts. The polar bears at the zoo, the Nonsuch and the planetarium at the Manitoba Museum, the Mint tour, the bison at Fort Whyte and the aviation museum’s hangar fill the other days; the Human Rights Museum has a strong family programme. In summer, the Assiniboine Park train and duck pond, the Goldeyes’ ballpark, the splash pads and Grand Beach’s dunes are the outdoor list. Folklorama’s pavilions are a painless world tour for children.

Winnipeg on a budget

Winnipeg is one of the most affordable cities in Canada, and the free list is long: The Forks and the river trail in every season, the Exchange District’s streets, the Legislative Building tour, Assiniboine Park and its gardens, the Saint-Boniface Cathedral ruins, Fort Whyte’s trails on some days, and Nuit Blanche and the Fringe’s outdoor stages. The Human Rights Museum, the art gallery and the Manitoba Museum are moderately priced and have discounted evenings; check their sites. Eat cheaply and well at the Forks Market, the Filipino food courts, the perogy suppers and the pho shops. Hotels are among the cheapest of any big Canadian city outside the Jets’ playoff runs and Folklorama; compare by neighbourhood on our Winnipeg hotel search.

Day trips from Winnipeg

Lower Fort Garry, half an hour north on the Red River, is the oldest intact stone fur-trade post in North America, with costumed interpreters in summer. Grand Beach on Lake Winnipeg, an hour north, is one of the best freshwater beaches on the continent, with white sand and dunes; Gimli, on the same lake, is the largest Icelandic community outside Iceland, with a festival in August. Riding Mountain National Park, three hours northwest, is a plateau of forest, lakes and bison above the prairie. Steinbach‘s Mennonite Heritage Village, an hour southeast, tells the story of the prairie’s Mennonite settlers. Whiteshell Provincial Park, two hours east, is Canadian Shield lake country. Birds Hill Park, half an hour northeast, hosts the Folk Festival and has trails and a beach. And Churchill, the polar bear capital, is not a day trip but a two-day train ride or a two-hour flight north, and the reason many visitors come through Winnipeg in October and November. All but Churchill need a car; see our Winnipeg car rental page, and Travel Manitoba for the province.

Two sample itineraries

Two days, no car

Day one: the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in the morning, lunch at the Forks Market, the river walk and the Oodena circle, across the Esplanade Riel to Saint-Boniface for the cathedral and the museum, back for the Legislative Building, and dinner and drinks in the Exchange District. Day two: the Manitoba Museum and the Nonsuch first, the Exchange District on foot with the art gallery and Qaumajuq, lunch on Albert Street, a bus to Assiniboine Park for the polar bears and the Leaf in the afternoon, and dinner in Osborne Village or on Corydon, or a Jets game if the season is on.

Four days, with a car

Add a day for the Mint, Fort Whyte’s bison and Lower Fort Garry, and a day for Grand Beach and Gimli in summer, or, in winter, a day skating the river trail and driving out of the city lights for the aurora.

Practical details

• Transit: Winnipeg Transit’s buses; pay cash with exact change, buy tickets, or use a Peggo card. See our transit-versus-car guide for detail.
• From YWG: a taxi or ride-hail in 15 to 20 minutes, the city bus to downtown, or a rental from the terminal. The airport’s site covers ground transport.
• Weather: serious cold-weather gear from November to March, sun protection and insect repellent in summer. Environment Canada’s forecast is the one to check.
• Time zone: Central, one hour behind Toronto and the same as Chicago.
• Entry requirements: U.S. citizens need a valid passport; most other visa-exempt visitors arriving by air need an Electronic Travel Authorization. The Government of Canada’s visitor page is the authoritative source.
• Safety: the downtown core and the Main Street strip north of the Exchange need ordinary big-city awareness late at night; The Forks, the Exchange and the neighbourhoods are relaxed.

Frequently asked questions

How many days do you need in Winnipeg?

Two full days covers The Forks, the Human Rights Museum, the Exchange, Saint-Boniface and the zoo; three adds the Mint, Fort Whyte and Lower Fort Garry; a fourth adds a lake day in summer.

What is Winnipeg best known for?

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, The Forks, the Exchange District, the Jets’ whiteout, Folklorama, the Festival du Voyageur, the polar bears at the zoo, and being the gateway to Churchill.

Is Winnipeg worth visiting?

Yes, and far more than its reputation suggests: a world-class museum, a preserved heritage district, a genuinely multicultural food scene and some of the lowest prices of any big Canadian city.

Is Winnipeg walkable?

The core is: The Forks, downtown, the Exchange and Saint-Boniface are within twenty minutes of each other. Assiniboine Park and the neighbourhoods need a bus or a car.

Do I need a car in Winnipeg?

Not for the core. For the zoo in winter, the Mint, Fort Whyte and the lake and park day trips, yes; rent for those days only.

How cold does Winnipeg get?

January highs are around -12 °C and lows around -21 °C, with cold snaps to -35 °C and wind chills beyond. It is dry and sunny, the city is built for it, and the river trail and the Voyageur festival are the reward.

Can I see polar bears in Winnipeg?

Yes, at the Assiniboine Park Zoo’s Journey to Churchill exhibit, year-round. For wild bears, Churchill is a two-hour flight north, best in October and November.

Ready to go? Compare flights to Winnipeg, find a place to stay with our Winnipeg hotel search, and if the lake or the parks are on the list, price a rental car for those days.