Top 10 Museums in Canada
Canada's museums reflect a country assembled from multiple nations and histories: French and British colonial heritage, deep Indigenous tradition, waves of immigration, and one of the world's most productive palaeontological records. The institutions below range from a transformed Toronto Edwardian building to a purpose-built structure on the banks of the Ottawa River, from a container-ship shed in Halifax to a prairie fossil quarry. All reward a visit with something that cannot be found anywhere else.
Explore them on the map before you travel.
1. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
Founded in 1914 and located in the Bloor-University neighbourhood of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum holds over thirteen million objects across natural history, world cultures, and art. The 2007 Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition — a Daniel Libeskind design of intersecting angular volumes in aluminium and glass that collides with the original Edwardian building — divided architectural opinion but unified attendance figures. The ROM's dinosaur galleries, featuring specimens from Alberta's Badlands, and its Chinese galleries, built around diplomatic and scholarly exchanges dating to the 1920s, are among the strongest in North America. Open daily; admission charged.
2. Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau
Opened in 1989 in Gatineau, across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, the Canadian Museum of History was designed by Douglas Cardinal in a sinuous red granite and glass form that references Indigenous architecture. Its Grand Hall — a 112-metre enclosed space housing six complete Pacific Coast Indigenous house facades — is one of the most architecturally dramatic interior spaces in any museum in the world. The Canada Hall traces 1,000 years of the country's social history through full-scale reconstructions of Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, a New France village, and a 1900s Prairie main street. Free on Thursday evenings.
3. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1860 and the oldest in Canada, occupies five interconnected pavilions in the Golden Square Mile neighbourhood. Its encyclopedic collection encompasses Canadian, European, and international art from antiquity to the present, with particular strength in Quebec decorative arts and Inuit sculpture. The Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion for Peace, opened in 2016, holds world cultures and archaeological collections in a building designed by Provencher Roy Architectes. The museum runs one of the most ambitious art and health therapy programmes in the world, in partnership with physicians who prescribe museum visits for patients with certain conditions. Open Tuesday to Sunday; first Sunday of each month free.
4. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
The Art Gallery of Ontario traces its origins to 1900 and now holds over 95,000 works, making it one of the largest art museums in North America. The 2008 Frank Gehry transformation — Gehry's hometown building — wrapped the original neoclassical structure in glass and Douglas fir, creating a Walker Court atrium and Galleria Italia exhibition space that dramatically expanded the museum's capacity. The AGO's strength lies in European old masters, a comprehensive collection of works by Henry Moore (donated by Moore himself), and the country's most significant collection of Indigenous and Canadian art, including the Group of Seven. Open Tuesday to Sunday; Wednesdays free after 5 p.m.
5. Vancouver Art Gallery
The Vancouver Art Gallery, founded in 1931 and currently housed in the former provincial law courts building designed by Francis Rattenbury, holds over 12,000 works with particular depth in British Columbia Modernism and the work of Emily Carr. Carr's expressive canvases of Pacific Northwest forest, Indigenous villages, and sky — she is among the most important Canadian painters of the twentieth century — are permanently displayed. The VAG has been planning a move to a new purpose-built building on Larwill Park for more than a decade; until that transition occurs, the heritage building on Robson Square remains the address. Open daily; Tuesdays free after 5 p.m.
6. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
The National Gallery of Canada, opened in its current building on Sussex Drive in 1988 (architect: Moshe Safdie), holds the most comprehensive collection of Canadian art in the world alongside significant European and American holdings. The building's Great Hall, a 42-metre glass barrel vault facing Parliament Hill, is one of the finest museum spaces in the country. Louise Bourgeois's Maman — a nine-metre bronze spider that guards the main entrance — is among the most reproduced public sculptures in the world. The collection's highlights include Paul Kane's portraits of Indigenous life, Cornelius Krieghoff's Quebec genre scenes, and a strong collection of Inuit printmaking. Open Tuesday to Sunday; Thursdays free after 5 p.m.
7. Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, Drumheller, Alberta
The Royal Tyrrell Museum, opened in 1985 in the badlands of the Red Deer River valley at Drumheller, Alberta, holds one of the largest collections of dinosaur specimens in the world — over 500 complete or near-complete skeletons displayed in galleries that reproduce the stratigraphy of the surrounding landscape. The Cretaceous Garden connects the museum's indoor specimens to living plant species descended from Cretaceous-era flora. The museum is named for Joseph Burr Tyrrell, the geologist who discovered the first Albertosaurus skull in the Badlands in 1884. Field tours of active excavation sites are available in summer. Open daily in summer; closed Mondays in winter.
8. Glenbow Museum, Calgary
The Glenbow Museum in downtown Calgary, founded in 1966 from Eric Harvie's private collection of Western Canadian history, holds over a million objects covering the art, culture, and history of the Canadian West, with exceptional depth in Indigenous material culture and the history of the fur trade and settlement. Its Niitsitapi: Our Way of Life gallery, developed in deep consultation with Blackfoot communities, is among the most considered presentations of Indigenous history in a Canadian museum. The museum closed for major renovations in 2022 and is scheduled to reopen with expanded gallery space by 2025. Check website for current status.
9. McCord Stewart Museum, Montreal
The McCord Stewart Museum, affiliated with McGill University since its founding in 1921, focuses on the social history of Montreal and Canada through photography, decorative arts, clothing, and documentary material. Its Notman Photographic Archives — over 450,000 photographs taken between the 1850s and 1930s by the studio of William Notman and successors — constitute one of the most important nineteenth-century photographic records in the world. The museum excels at making historical material accessible to general visitors through themed temporary exhibitions drawn from its collections. Open Tuesday to Sunday.
10. Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, Halifax
Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was the arrival point for over one million immigrants to Canada between 1928 and 1971. The Museum of Immigration, which opened in a converted shed on the original wharf in 1999 and became a national museum in 2011, documents the immigration experience through personal testimonies, archival material, and an interactive research centre that allows visitors to search for their own family's immigration records. The scale of Pier 21's legacy is particular to Halifax: a significant proportion of Canadians can trace a relative's first step onto Canadian soil to this building. Open daily June to October; closed Mondays off-season.