Toronto's Most Iconic Landmarks

The CN Tower is the slender concrete needle that dominates Toronto's skyline, rising 553.3 metres above the rail lands at the foot of downtown.

Built by Canadian National as a broadcasting and communications mast, it was engineered to punch television and radio signals cleanly over the tall buildings that were crowding the city core, and in doing so it became the tallest free-standing structure in the world, a title it held for more than three decades until Dubai's Burj Khalifa overtook it in 2007.

The public experience climbs in stages.

Glass-fronted elevators race up the exterior in under a minute to the main LookOut level, where floor-to-ceiling windows open onto a panorama that on a clear day reaches across Lake Ontario toward Niagara and the mist rising from the falls.

One level down waits the tower's most famous dare, the Glass Floor, a transparent panel that leaves nothing but air between you and the ground far below. Higher still, the SkyPod at 447 metres offers the loftiest enclosed view in the country.

For the truly fearless, EdgeWalk sends harnessed visitors on a hands-free stroll around the rim of the main pod, leaning back over the edge with the city spread out beneath them.

Back inside, the revolving 360 Restaurant turns a slow full circle roughly every hour, so a single meal delivers the entire horizon.

Whatever level you choose, the tower is the clearest way to read Toronto: the grid of downtown, the green islands offshore, and the endless blue plane of the lake.

Casa Loma is the turreted mansion that crowns the escarpment of Davenport Hill, a Gothic Revival castle built between 1911 and 1914 for the financier Sir Henry Pellatt, who made his fortune bringing hydroelectric power to Toronto. Designed by the prominent architect E. J.

Lennox, it was among the largest private homes ever raised in Canada, with nearly a hundred rooms, soaring towers, and a price tag that would eventually help ruin its owner.

Inside, the house is a study in Edwardian ambition and imported grandeur: an oak-panelled Great Hall rising to a beamed ceiling, a conservatory beneath a stained-glass dome, wood-panelled libraries, and a suite of period rooms filled with the comforts of a bygone gilded age.

An 800-foot tunnel runs underground to the stables and carriage room, where the horses were reputedly housed in mahogany stalls, and the two towers reward the climb with views out over the rooftops toward the lake.

Pellatt lived in his castle for less than a decade before mounting debts and taxes forced him out, and the house passed through uncertain years before the city took it on as a public attraction.

Today it operates as a historic house museum and event venue, its terraced gardens open in the warmer months, and it has served as a filming location for countless movies and television series drawn to its improbable, romantic silhouette above the modern city.

The Royal Ontario Museum, known to everyone as the ROM, is the largest museum in Canada and one of the great encyclopedic collections in North America, spanning natural history and world cultures under a single roof.

Its original heritage buildings, opened in 1914 and expanded over the following decades, present a dignified stone-and-tile facade, most famously the vaulted rotunda whose ceiling glitters with gold mosaic.

In 2007 the museum grafted a startling addition onto that historic core: the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, a deconstructivist eruption of angled aluminium and glass by architect Daniel Libeskind that crashes out over the corner of Bloor Street and Queen's Park.

Loved and argued over in equal measure, the Crystal turned the museum into an architectural landmark and dramatically reoriented its entrance toward the city.

The collections are vast and famously good with children and adults alike.

The dinosaur galleries hold towering mounted skeletons, the Bat Cave lets visitors walk through a darkened recreation of a Jamaican cavern, and the world-culture galleries range across Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, and First Peoples art and artifacts, including a celebrated collection of Chinese sculpture and a full Ming tomb.

The gem and mineral rooms glitter with meteorites and crystals, so a visit can swing from deep time to distant civilizations in a single afternoon.

The Distillery District is a beautifully preserved enclave of Victorian industrial architecture just east of downtown, built around the old Gooderham and Worts distillery whose origins reach back to 1832.

At its peak it was the largest distillery in the British Empire, and the tight cluster of red-brick warehouses, malt houses, and tank buildings it left behind forms one of the best-preserved collections of industrial architecture on the continent.

After the distillery closed, the site was reborn as a car-free pedestrian quarter, its cobblestone lanes given over to art galleries, design shops, artisan chocolatiers, coffee roasters, restaurants, breweries, and a well-known theatre company.

The strict ban on cars, along with a commitment to independent rather than chain tenants, gives the district an unhurried, European feel that sets it apart from the glass towers a few blocks away.

The brick canyons and iron fittings make it one of the most photogenic places in the city and a favourite film location, and public art is scattered throughout, including a much-photographed heart sculpture and a soaring love-lock installation.

In winter the district hosts a hugely popular holiday market that fills the lanes with lights, stalls, and a towering tree, while warmer months bring patios and outdoor events to the same cobblestones.

Toronto City Hall is the sculptural seat of municipal government downtown, the winning design of a 1958 international competition that lifted the young Finnish architect Viljo Revell out of relative obscurity.

Completed in 1965, it broke sharply from the fussy stone civic buildings of the era, replacing them with two gently curving concrete towers of different heights that embrace a low, domed council chamber, an arrangement often likened to an eye looking out over the city.

The towers' inner faces are windowless curved shells, while their outer faces are ribbed with windows, so that from above the whole composition reads as a single unblinking eye, a deliberately futuristic image of open, forward-looking government.

The building was instantly controversial and just as quickly embraced, becoming the emblem of a mid-century Toronto eager to shed its provincial reputation and announce itself as a modern metropolis.

Spreading out in front is Nathan Phillips Square, the city's central public plaza, with its concrete walkways arcing over a reflecting pool that freezes into a skating rink each winter.

The square holds Henry Moore's bronze sculpture The Archer, the illuminated 3D Toronto Sign, and a set of soaring arches added in a later redesign, and it hosts markets, concerts, protests, and celebrations throughout the year, making it the true civic living room of the city.

The Art Gallery of Ontario, universally called the AGO, is one of the largest art museums in North America, founded in 1900 and grown over more than a century into a sprawling institution on Dundas Street West at the edge of Chinatown.

Its collection ranges across European masters, contemporary art, African and Oceanic works, and photography, but its deepest strength is Canadian art, held in a collection without rival.

In 2008 the museum reopened after a dramatic transformation by Frank Gehry, who grew up in the surrounding neighbourhood and returned to redesign the building that stands near his childhood home.

His intervention wrapped the Dundas Street facade in a long, billowing curve of glass and Douglas fir and threaded a spiralling wooden staircase up through the galleries, giving the AGO an architectural identity to match its holdings while keeping the historic Grange mansion at its core.

Inside, the galleries hold a celebrated collection of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, whose luminous landscapes helped define a national visual identity, alongside works by First Nations, Inuit, and contemporary Canadian artists.

The Thomson Collection brings European masterpieces and a remarkable model ship gallery, and the museum's large collection of Henry Moore sculpture, much of it donated by the artist himself, fills a dedicated light-filled hall.