What to see in Toronto, one-day itinerary including the main places of interest, including Casa Loma, Science Museum and CN Tower, as well as the latest shopping centers.
Tourist information
In a desert-dominated country with no roads and natural wonders, Toronto stands out as a beacon of culture and urbanization.
More sophisticated than Vancouver and more cosmopolitan than Ottawa, it is a city with a surprisingly European flavor.
It is the largest metropolis in Canada but is not its capital, although it would have all the characteristics to be so.
In fact, a large part of the national GDP is generated in Toronto, there are shopping centers with designer stores, restaurants where you can eat with silver cutlery and a landscape that is constantly regenerating itself reflecting in Lake Ontario.
The most representative landmark of the city is the CN Tower which, with its 451 meters high, is one of the tallest towers in the world, from which you can enjoy a breathtaking view up to 120 km away, through the landscape surrounding urban and Lake Ontario.
Glass elevators take visitors to the main section, which is 342 meters high, where the glass floor allows visitors to look down.
A more peaceful view can be had by going upstairs, where there is a restaurant.
Another series of elevators leads to Skypod, 33 floors higher.
At the base of the tower there are leisure facilities which include a motorbike-simulator and a modern aquarium.
As a colony, the city occasionally had to deal with the revolutionaries in the south, so Fort York was founded in 1793 to ensure British control of Lake Ontario.
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The construction of most of the buildings, however, dates back to periods after 1814, as during the war of 1812, the British evacuation detonated the powder keg, causing the destruction of most of the buildings of the fort.
Located in the heart of downtown Toronto, next to the CN Tower, the Ripley aquarium is characterized by many species of exotic fish.
It is possible to visit it for its 96 meters in length, using a unique treadmill, which passes through a tunnel under the shark lagoon and the tropical coral reef.
The Roma is one of the most interesting national museums, where collections are housed which include about 6 million finds.
The exhibitions, which represent the Asian East, include a renowned collection of Chinese art, wall paintings, tobacco bottles and cushions with ceramic headrests.
Other areas of the museum include life sciences, the ancient Mediterranean and a collection of Canadian heritage.
Reopened after an expansion led by Frank Gehry, an architect from Toronto, the Aug, Canada's art gallery, contains 110 galleries dedicated to temporary exhibitions and a large permanent collection of international art.
The European collection includes works of the Italian Renaissance, Flemish masters, French painting of the seventeenth century, impressionists and works by Chagall and Picasso.
The gallery's major attraction is the Canadian collection, with a section dedicated to the Group of Seven, the first painters of the twentieth century, whose work embodies the sublime beauty of the wild boreal nature of Canada.
The gallery is also home to one of the world's largest collections of Inuit art and Henry Moore's works.
It is worth reserving some time to visit the Grange, a renovated 19th century house adjacent to the gallery.
What see
Casa Loma is a 98-room castle, completed in 1914 by Sir Henry Pellatt, charismatic, industrial and philanthropist financier who established his home there.
Subsequently, due to a financial crisis, this castle was put up for sale, becoming a popular tourist attraction from then on.
The medieval castle has an external part made of stone, characterized by many battlements and turrets, while the interior is furnished in the style of the twentieth century.
Worthy of note are the beautifully carved rooms, the secret passages and the Great Hall, a lounge with 18-meter high ceilings.
The gardens can be visited in the period from May to October.
The Ontario Science Center is the science museum, inaugurated in 1969 with the intent to open minds to science by arousing curiosity, creating a place to find inspiration for new ideas to be implemented, motivating learning in the field of science and technology.
This difficult task is successfully accomplished by using over 800 fascinating exhibits.
Topics explored in depth include the mysteries of the human brain and space travel.
Interactive exhibits allow you to fly a spacecraft.
Spread over 287 hectares of woodland near the Rouge Valley in the suburb of Scarborough, Toronto Zoo is one of the largest zoos in the world.
The collection of over 5,000 animals includes international species.
The characteristic areas of the zoo are called African savannah, the Americas, Indo-Malaysia, Oceania, Eurasia and Canadian domination.
The Bata Shoe Museum is a museum unique in the world of its kind, housed in a building in the shape of a shoe box, the museum includes over twelve thousand items of footwear, dating back to 4,500 years ago.
The pieces featured include Elvis Presley's moccasins, ballroom slippers that belonged to Queen Victoria and the Tudor pointy leather shoes.
A semi-permanent exhibition showcases celebrity shoes from the twentieth century onwards.
Canada Wonderland, located on the northern outskirts of Maple, is an amusement park with over 200 attractions spread over its 121 hectares of land and 8 hectares of water park.
Includes 69 rides, including Drop Tower, Jet Scream, Scooby-Doo ghost house, Shockwave and Splashworks, a 20-acre water park.
The Gardiner Museum is one of the most important ceramic art museums in the world, comprising Asian pottery, nineteenth-century pottery and contemporary pottery in the studio, as well as collections of Italian Renaissance majolica.
Located in the port of Toronto, facing the panorama of the city center, the Toronto islands are a place for recreation and holidays.
They became islands after 1858, when a storm caused a rift between the peninsula and the mainland, they are accessible only by ferry.
