Canada (British Columbia)
Vanier Park museum complex (Vancouver)
A little to the west of Granville Island, Vanier Park conveniently collects most of the city's main museums: the Vancouver Museum, the Maritime Museum and the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre (the last combines the old planetarium and observatory). The complex sits on the waterfront at the west end of the Burrard Bridge, near Kitsilano Beach and the residential-entertainment centres of Kitsilano and West 4th Avenue, and Vanier Park itself is a fine spot to while away a summer afternoon. You could easily incorporate a visit to the museums with a trip to Granville Island using the ferry, which docks just below the Maritime Museum. Coming from downtown, take the #22 Macdonald bus south from anywhere on Burrard or West Pender – get off at the first stop after the bridge and walk down Chester Street to the park. The park's pleasant but open – there's little shade – and has a few nice patches of sandy beach on its fringes if you don't want to trek all the way to Kits and Jericho beaches.

 
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre
The H.R. MacMillan Space Centre (July–Aug daily 10am–5pm; Sept–June Tues–Sun 10am–5pm; evening laser shows at varying times Thurs–Sun; $12.50; tel 738-7827, www.hrmacmillanspacecentre.com) incorporates the MacMillan Planetarium and a range of space-related displays and shows. Its main draws are its star shows and its rock and laser extravaganzas, the latter for fans of the genre only. The Gordon Southam Observatory, nearby, is usually open for public stargazing on clear weekend nights; astronomers are on hand to show you the ropes and help you position your camera for a "Shoot the Moon" photography session of the heavens (call Space Centre for times; free).

Maritime Museum
The Maritime Museum, 1905 Ogden Ave (May–Sept daily 10am–5pm; Oct–April Tues–Sat 10am–5pm, Sun noon–5pm; $7; tel 257-8300), is a short 150-metre walk from the Vancouver Museum and features lovely early photographs evoking c.1900 Vancouver, though the rest of the presentation doesn't quite do justice to the status of the city as one of the world's leading ports. The less arresting displays, however, are redeemed by the renovated St Roch, a two-masted schooner that was the first vessel to navigate the famed Northwest Passage in a single season; it now sits impressively in its own wing of the museum, where it can be viewed by guided tour only. Special summer shows spice things up a little, as do the recent Pirates' Cove and Children's Maritime Discovery Centre, both aimed at making the museum more attractive to children. Outside, just below the museum on Heritage Harbour (quay for ferries to and from Granville Island), you can admire, free of charge, more restored old-fashioned vessels.

Museum of Anthropology
Located well out of downtown on the University of British Columbia campus, the Museum of Anthropology, 6393 NW Marine Drive, is far and away Vancouver's most important museum (mid-May to early Sept daily 10am–5pm, until 9pm on Tuesday; early Sept–mid-May Tues 11am–9pm, Wed–Sun 11am–5pm, closed Mon; $7, free Tues 5–9pm; tel 822-3825, www.moa.ubc.ca). Emphasizing the art and culture of the natives of the region, and the Haida in particular, its collection of carvings, totem poles and artefacts is unequalled in North America.

To get there by bus, catch the #10 or #4 bus south from Granville Street and stay on until the end of the line. The campus is huge and disorienting – to find the museum, turn right from the bus stop, walk along the tree-lined East Mall to the very bottom (10min), then turn left on NW Marine Drive and walk till you see the museum on the right (another 5min). In the foyer pick up a free mini-guide or the cheap larger booklet – a worthwhile investment, given the exhibits' almost total lack of labelling, but still pretty thin.

Much is made of the museum's award-winning layout, a cool and spacious collection of halls designed by Arthur Erickson, the eminent architect also responsible for converting the Vancouver Art Gallery. Particularly outstanding is the huge Great Hall, inspired by native cedar houses, which makes as perfect an artificial setting for its thirty-odd totem poles as you could ask for. Huge windows look out to more poles and Haida houses, which you're free to wander around, backed by views of Burrard Inlet and the distant mountains. Most of the poles and monolithic carvings, indoors and out, are taken from the coastal tribes of the Haida, Salish, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl, all of which share cultural elements. The suspicion – though it's never confessed – is that scholars really don't know terribly much of the arcane mythology behind the carvings, but the best guess as to their meaning is that the various animals correspond to different clans or the creatures after which the clans were named. To delve deeper into the complexities, it's worth joining an hour-long, all-year guided walk.

One of the museum's great virtues is that none of its displays are hidden away in basements or back rooms; instead they're jammed in overwhelming numbers into drawers and cases in the galleries to the right of the Great Hall. Most of the permanent collection revolves around Canadian Pacific cultures, but the Inuit and Far North exhibits are also outstanding. So, too, are the jewellery, masks and baskets of Northwest native tribes, all markedly delicate after the blunt-nosed carvings of the Great Hall. Look out especially for the argillite sculptures, made from a jet-black slate found only on BC's Haida Gwaii or Queen Charlotte Islands. The African and Asian collections are also pretty comprehensive, if smaller, but appear as something of an afterthought alongside the indigenous artefacts. A small, technical archeological section rounds off the smaller galleries, along with a new three-gallery wing designed to house the Koerner Collection, an assortment of six hundred European ceramics dating from the fifteenth century onwards.

The museum saves its best for last. Housed in a separate rotunda, The Raven and the Beast, a modern sculpture designed by Haida artist Bill Reid, is the museum's pride and joy and has achieved almost iconographic status in the city. Carved from a 4.5-tonne block of cedar and requiring the attention of five people over three years, it describes the Haida legend of human evolution with stunning virtuosity, depicting terrified figures squirming from a half-open clam shell, overseen by an enormous and stern-faced raven. However, beautiful as the work is, its rotunda setting makes it seem oddly out of place – almost like a corporate piece of art.

Vancouver Museum
The Vancouver Museum, 1100 Chestnut St (Mon–Wed & Fri–Sun 10am–5pm, Thurs 10am–9pm; $8; tel 736-4431, www.vancouvermuseum.bc.ca), traces the history of the city and the lower British Columbian mainland, and invokes the area's past in its very form – the flying-saucer shape is a nod to the conical cedar-bark hats of the Northwest Coast natives, former inhabitants of the area. The fountain outside, looking like a crab on a bidet, recalls the animal of native legend that guards the port entrance.

Though it's the main focus of interest at Vanier Park, the museum is not as captivating as you'd expect from a city like Vancouver. It claims 300,000 exhibits, but it's hard to know where they all are, and a visit needn't take more than an hour or so. A patchy collection of baskets, tools, clothes and miscellaneous artefacts of aboriginal peoples – including a huge whaling canoe, the only example in a museum – homes in on the 8000 years before the coming of white settlers. After that, the main collection, weaving in and out of Vancouver's history up to World War I, is full of offbeat and occasionally memorable insights if you have the patience to read the material – notably the accounts of early explorers' often extraordinary exploits, the immigration section (which re-creates what it felt like to travel steerage) and the forestry displays. The twentieth-century section is disappointing, most of the time looking more like an antique shop than a museum.