Toronto is the most quietly extraordinary city in the Western Hemisphere — quietly, because it lacks the cinematic mythology of New York, the architectural drama of Chicago and the Pacific glamour of San Francisco, and yet outperforms all three on the metric that matters most in the 21st century: the functional, daily reality of a city that genuinely works. With 2.9 million people in the city and 6.4 million in the Greater Toronto Area, it is the fourth-largest city in North America. With 51% of its population born outside Canada — the highest proportion of any city in the world — it is the most genuinely multicultural urban experiment on earth. And with the specific Canadian quality of making all this diversity feel ordinary rather than exceptional, it achieves something that Los Angeles, New York and London manage only in theory.

The CN Tower (1976, 553 metres, the world's tallest free-standing structure from its completion until 2007) is the Toronto landmark, and the view from its 447-metre observation deck — Lake Ontario stretching south to the horizon, the Niagara Escarpment visible on clear days, the grid of the city running north as far as the eye can follow — is the most complete single view of a Canadian city available anywhere. The Royal Ontario Museum (1914, the Daniel Libeskind Crystal extension 2007 — a collision of angular glass and steel volumes erupting from the original Edwardian building that was controversial in 2007 and acclaimed by 2015) is Canada's largest museum: 40 galleries covering natural history, world cultures, and art across 6 million objects. The Art Gallery of Ontario (the Frank Gehry renovation 2008, whose titanium-and-glass facade along Dundas Street West is the finest piece of contemporary architecture in Toronto) houses the largest collection of Henry Moore sculptures outside England.

Toronto's food culture is the most varied in Canada: the Kensington Market neighbourhood (a Victorian residential district that became a Jewish market in the early 20th century, then Caribbean, then Vietnamese, then Korean, now a permanent palimpsest of all of them, with the best cheese shop in Canada, a dozen Caribbean jerk chicken joints, a vintage clothing strip and a weekly Sunday car-free afternoon that is the most communal public space in the city); Chinatown (one of the largest in North America, on Spadina Avenue); the St Lawrence Market (George Brown, 1844, rebuilt 1904 — the best single-building food market in Canada, with the peameal bacon sandwich at Carousel Bakery a Toronto institution since 1945); and the Distillery District (the largest collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America, now galleries, restaurants and the TIFF Bell Lightbox) complete a food and cultural landscape of extraordinary breadth. Niagara Falls is 90 minutes by car or 2 hours by train — one of the most visited natural sites on earth, and the most dramatic day trip from any Canadian city.

Vancouver is the city that makes everywhere else in Canada feel slightly overcast. Not metaphorically — Vancouver's specific geographical setting (the North Shore Mountains rising directly from Burrard Inlet, visible from downtown; Stanley Park's 1,000-acre rainforest immediately west of the financial district; the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Strait of Georgia to the north) gives it a visual drama that is available to no other major city in the country. The combination of mountain, ocean and urban density in a single horizon — visible from every corner of downtown on a clear day — is the defining quality of Vancouver and the reason its population has grown from 400,000 to 2.6 million in the Greater Vancouver Area in fifty years.

Stanley Park (405 hectares of old-growth Douglas fir and cedar immediately adjacent to the downtown core, circumnavigated by the 8.8km seawall — the world's longest uninterrupted waterfront path) is the finest urban park in North America: not for its facilities (though the Vancouver Aquarium is excellent) but for the specific experience of being in 800-year-old rainforest within walking distance of a glass-and-steel financial district. The Granville Island (a former industrial peninsula under the Granville Bridge, now a public market, brewery, galleries, theatres and boat rentals that is the most successful waterfront regeneration project in Canadian urban history) is the best single address in Vancouver: the Public Market's local salmon, Dungeness crab, saltspring mussels, BC berries and the specific culture of a market that supplies restaurants and homes with equal seriousness.

The North Shore Mountains — Grouse Mountain (accessible by cable car, skiing and snowshoeing in winter, hiking and wildlife in summer, all with a helicopter-lift view of the city below), Mount Seymour (family skiing and snowshoeing), and Cypress Mountain (2010 Winter Olympics freestyle skiing venue, with the most dramatic night view of the city's lights spread across the Burrard Inlet below) — make Vancouver the only city in the world where you can ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon. Whistler (1.5 hours north on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, North America's top ski resort for 20 consecutive years, with 8,171 acres of skiable terrain across two mountains) extends the outdoor proposition into a genuinely world-class destination. The Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Arthur Erickson, 1976, one of the finest pieces of architecture in Canada) houses the world's most important collection of Northwest Coast First Nations art — monumental totem poles, carved feast dishes, button blankets — in a building designed to flood the galleries with Pacific light.

Montréal is the most underrated great city in the Western Hemisphere — a city of 2 million people (4.2 million in the metropolitan area) that is simultaneously the second-largest French-speaking city in the world (after Paris), the restaurant capital of North America by Michelin-star density per capita, the festival capital of North America (25 major festivals between May and September, drawing 4 million visitors annually), and the most architecturally varied Canadian city: French colonial churches, Victorian commercial buildings, Art Deco skyscrapers, Expo 67 modernist structures and the contemporary buildings of the Quartier des Spectacles coexisting in a city that treats its architectural heritage with a seriousness that Toronto and Vancouver, newer and less historically anchored, cannot match.

The Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal (James O'Donnell, 1829, Gothic Revival in deep blue and gold, the largest church in Canada and arguably the most beautiful interior in North America — the nave's blue painted vault, the carved wood pulpit, the 7,000-pipe Casavant organ, all illuminated by rose windows) is the building that most immediately explains what distinguishes Montréal from other North American cities: the specific combination of French Catholic aesthetic seriousness and English North American energy, resolved in a building that is simultaneously liturgically serious and theatrically magnificent. Vieux-Montréal (Old Montréal, the original colonial settlement on the St Lawrence waterfront, with its cobblestone streets, 17th-century stone buildings, the Marché Bonsecours, and the Vieux-Port promenade) is the most intact colonial district in any Canadian city and the best place to understand Montréal's 400-year history.

Montréal's food culture is the finest in Canada and competes with the best in North America: the specific institutions of smoked meat (Schwartz's Deli on Boulevard Saint-Laurent, founded 1928, a 22-seat restaurant that has been serving the same spiced, slow-cured brisket for almost a century — with a queue outside at most hours), the bagel (the Montréal bagel — smaller, denser, honey-sweetened, wood-fired at St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel, both operating 24 hours, both objects of devotion that make New York bagels seem approximate), the poutine (the Québécois combination of hand-cut fries, fresh cheese curds and dark gravy that is simultaneously one of the most improbable and one of the most satisfying dishes on earth) and the restaurant explosion of the Mile-End and Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhoods (where Joe Beef, Au Pied de Cochon and their successors have made Montréal one of the dozen cities in the world where serious food tourism justifies a dedicated trip) define a gastronomic culture without parallel in North America.

Halifax is the most character-concentrated city in Canada relative to its size: a city of 460,000 people (the largest in Atlantic Canada) that combines the deepest natural harbour in the world (the second largest by surface area, after Sydney), the most intact 18th-century British colonial military architecture in North America (the Halifax Citadel, a star-shaped fort on the drumlin overlooking the harbour, garrisoned from 1749), the most important maritime history of any Canadian city (it was the principal Allied convoy staging port in both World Wars, and the site of the Halifax Explosion of December 1917 — when a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in the harbour, producing the largest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb, killing 2,000 people and levelling the north end of the city — memorialised in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic) and the finest seafood in Canada.

The Halifax Waterfront — the Historic Properties (a row of 19th-century granite and ironstone warehouses on the harbour edge, now restaurants, galleries and bars), the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (the most comprehensive Atlantic Canadian maritime museum, including the SS Acadia research vessel and the largest collection of Titanic artefacts in the world — Halifax was the port that recovered the bodies and sent the rescue ships), and the Pier 21 (the Canadian Museum of Immigration, on the pier where more than a million immigrants entered Canada between 1928 and 1971) — constitutes a waterfront of extraordinary historical density for a city of this size. The Halifax Citadel National Historic Site (the current star-shaped fort dates from 1856, the fourth fort on the same site since 1749) is one of the most visited historic sites in Canada, and the view from its ramparts over the harbour, the Dartmouth waterfront opposite and the Atlantic horizon is the definitive Halifax panorama.

The Cabot Trail — the 300km circular highway around the Cape Breton Highlands, universally listed among the most scenic drives in the world, accessible from Halifax in 3 hours — is Nova Scotia's defining natural experience: the road climbs to 455-metre headlands above the Gulf of St Lawrence, drops to French Acadian fishing villages, passes through the Cape Breton Highlands National Park (where moose are reliably visible at dusk), and returns through the Bras d'Or Lakes (a landlocked salt lake almost as large as Prince Edward Island). The seafood of Atlantic Canada — the Halifax lobster (the finest in the world by the judgement of anyone who has eaten it beside the Atlantic; served whole at the harbourside restaurants of the Historic Properties for $30 in season, May–July); the Digby scallops (the sweetest scallops in North America, landed 90km from Halifax); the Lunenburg fish chowder (cream, smoked haddock, potato, the definitive Atlantic Canadian comfort food) — constitutes a regional food identity as distinctive as anything in Montréal or Toronto.