Stanley Park

Entry is free. The City charges nothing to walk, run, cycle, picnic, swim or sit on any part of the 400 hectares, and that includes the seawall, the beaches, Lost Lagoon, Beaver Lake, the rose garden and the totem poles at Brockton Point. There is no ticket office, so there is nothing to book and nothing to skip the line for.

What is not free is arriving by car. Pay parking is in force on every roadway and every lot inside the park, 6am to 11pm, seven days a week, all year, and it is enforced by plate rather than by a windscreen ticket. The rate changes with the season, and the day maximum is not sold at every machine: the operator lists eight meter stations, including both totem pole lots, Brockton Point, Prospect Point, the Teahouse and the Fish House, where you can only buy hours.

The three things inside the park you pay for

The train is a fourth thing people budget for and cannot buy. The Park Board states that train operations remain suspended because of safety concerns with the ageing systems, and that staff are exploring new operating models; no 2026 season and no prices are published. If a blog quotes you a child fare for the Stanley Park Train, it is quoting a year that has passed.

Parking figures and the parking seasons come from the City's Stanley Park parking page and the operator's own lot listing, read for this guide in Q3 2026; the carriage rates come from the operator's schedule and rates page, read the same day.

Coal Harbour to Brockton Point, the first 2 km

You start with the working side of the park: float planes lifting off the harbour, the rowing club, and the Nine O'Clock Gun on the point, a naval cannon that is fired electrically every night at 21:00. Hallelujah Point and Deadman's Island sit on this stretch, the island now a naval reserve base and, before that, a smallpox quarantine site and burial place. The history walk starts near here and spends most of its two hours on this end.

The totem poles and the welcome portals

Nine totem poles stand at Brockton Point, and the City calls them BC's most visited tourist attraction. They are also the park's most misunderstood object, and the misunderstanding is worth clearing up before you photograph them: see the section below on where they came from.

Beside them stand three red cedar portals carved by the Coast Salish artist Susan Point and installed in 2008, made with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Those are the Coast Salish work on the site; the poles are not.

Lions Gate Bridge to Prospect Point, the halfway mark

The seawall passes directly under the Lions Gate Bridge, which is the photograph most people come for and the point at which walkers realise how far around they still are. Prospect Point above it is the highest point in the park, reachable from the seawall only by a climb, so most walkers stay low and most drivers stop there instead.

Siwash Rock, Third Beach, Second Beach

Siwash Rock is the sea stack standing off the wall on the west side, with a small fir on top; the Squamish name is Slhx̱i7lsh. Cunningham's plaque is here. Past it the wall reaches Third Beach at Ferguson Point, which the City describes as a naturally sandy beach shielded from urban noise and the place for sunsets, and then Second Beach, where the outdoor pool sits behind the sand.

Second Beach Pool closed for the 2026 season on 7 September, and the City does not publish its 2026 opening date. The city's other outdoor saltwater pool, at Kitsilano Beach, ran to 13 September 2026.

Inland: Lost Lagoon, Beaver Lake, the gardens

The inner park is where the crowd thins. Lost Lagoon has a fountain and a heron colony nearby; Beaver Lake is the wetland the Indigenous led plant walk works around; the rose garden sits near the Georgia Street entrance and is free at all hours. The forest trails between them were logging roads, and on a wet day they are the better half of the park.

The variable is not the distance, it is whether you commit to the full circuit. The seawall does not shortcut: once you are past Brockton Point the only ways back are the loop itself, the interior trails or a long walk up to Park Drive. Decide before you start, because the point of no return is about 40 minutes in.

The collection started at Lumberman's Arch in the 1920s, when the Park Board bought four totems from Alert Bay on Vancouver Island, which is Kwakwaka'wakw territory. More were added from Haida Gwaii and from Rivers Inlet on the central coast, to mark the city's 1936 Golden Jubilee. In the mid 1960s the poles were moved to Brockton Point. The newest pole on the site was carved in 2009 by Robert Yelton of the Squamish Nation, whose mother was born in the village that stood here.

Totem poles are a northern coast tradition. The land itself is the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and the Coast Salish presence on the site is the three red cedar portals by Susan Point, made over three years with those three Nations and installed in 2008. Walk through them rather than past them; that is what they are for.

The purchase dates, the origins and the portal details are all published on the City's First Nations art page for the park, read in Q3 2026. Some of the poles on display are replicas, with originals moved into museum care, and the City does not publish a pole by pole list of which are which.

The City's wording is blunt: there is no public transit service around the park. TransLink's number 19 gets you to the edge, stopping on Stanley Park Drive near Lost Lagoon and at Stanley Park Loop, which is a short walk from the aquarium and the totem poles, and that is the extent of it. The trolley marketed as a shuttle is a privately operated paid tour, not a City service, and there is no free shuttle in 2026.

On foot from the West End it is roughly 20 minutes to the Georgia Street entrance from Robson Street, and less from English Bay to the Beach Avenue entrance. By bike from downtown it is 10 to 15 minutes on separated lanes; rental shops sit on Denman Street and around Coal Harbour, and the guided rides include the bike. If you drive, budget for the day maximum rather than hours: the loop takes longer than people expect, and eight of the meter stations do not sell a day ticket at all, so buy at a station that does or pay by app.

Accessibility: the City publishes an interactive accessibility map of trails, amenities and features rather than a single statement about the park, and accessible parking for the aquarium sits in the City lot on the north side of that building. The seawall itself is paved and flat for its whole length, which makes it one of the better wheeled routes in the city; details and the rest of the city's picture sit on the accessibility page.

- The counter clockwise cycling rule is not a published City rule. Every rental shop and every guide will tell you the bike lane runs one way anticlockwise, and on the ground it does; but the City publishes only two things, that the path is split between walkers nearest the water and cyclists on the inside path, and a 15 km/h limit on shared paths. Nothing on vancouver.ca states a direction [vancouver.ca seawall pages, read in Q3 2026]. - The seawall shuts for about three weeks every winter. The Park Board closes the section between Prospect Point and Third Beach, and Ferguson Point for a few days, to scale loose rock off the cliffs above the path. The dates for the coming winter are not published in advance [vancouver.ca Stanley Park seawall page]. - Pay parking runs to 11pm, an hour after the park's own closing time. The park is posted as open 6am to 10pm; parking enforcement runs 6am to 11pm, every day, all year, including the winter months when most visitors assume it lapses [vancouver.ca parking page and the operator's lot listing]. - There is no train and no free shuttle in 2026. Train operations remain suspended because of safety concerns with its ageing systems, and the City states plainly that there is no public transit service around the park [vancouver.ca miniature train and directions pages]. - The forest is not old growth all the way through. Six companies logged the peninsula between the 1860s and 1880s, and about 10,000 trees came down in the windstorm of 15 December 2006, so a good share of what you walk under is second growth or younger [Wikipedia's park article and its cited sources, cross checked against the Park Board's restoration record].

Put it first. The park is at its best before 09:00, it costs nothing, and it sets the geography of the rest of the city in your head: the North Shore mountains on one side, the bridge, the harbour, the West End behind you. Walk or ride the loop, come out at English Bay for lunch on Denman Street, and you have half a day accounted for without a single ticket.

If you have one day in the city, this and Granville Island are the pair that fit together, connected by the seawall and a small ferry across False Creek. If you have three, the park is the morning of the first, before the day trips take the rest. Everything else worth pricing before you come is on visiting Vancouver, Canada.