North America’s most diverse city, stacked around one unmistakable tower.

Toronto organises itself around the CN Tower the way older cities organise themselves around a cathedral or a castle — for over three decades it was the tallest freestanding structure on Earth, and it is still the instinctive point of reference from almost anywhere downtown, whether that means a harbour cruise angled to catch it from the water or, for the genuinely committed, the EdgeWalk’s hands-free circuit around the outside of its main pod, 356 metres up. Casa Loma, the financier Sir Henry Pellatt’s real 1914 castle, sits at the other end of the city’s temperament entirely — Edwardian rooms, a Prohibition-era tunnel, and thirty years of film productions shot on its grounds. Between the two, the Royal Ontario Museum and Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada hold, respectively, eighteen million artifacts and North America’s longest underwater tunnel, and the Hockey Hall of Fame keeps the sport’s own Stanley Cup on permanent display in a city that treats hockey as closer to civic religion than pastime.

What makes Toronto genuinely distinct, though, is what happens between the landmarks: this is regularly named the most ethnically diverse city on the planet, and neighbourhoods such as Kensington Market wear that fact openly, a few blocks holding Jamaican, Chilean, Tibetan and Swedish food stalls within sight of Chinatown. After dark, that same density of history turns toward its stranger side, with guided ghost walks through the financial district, the university campus or the Distillery District’s old whiskey warehouses. Beyond the city, Niagara Falls remains close enough for a single full day from Toronto — a coach ride, a skip-the-line boat into the spray, and the Journey Behind the Falls, all without a passport. These selected experiences are ways into that range, chosen so a stay can hold Toronto’s single dominant landmark and its hundred quieter neighbourhoods in the same trip.