Galiano Island
"Salt Spring gets the tourists. Galiano got left alone, and it shows in the best possible way."
A slender, largely undeveloped Gulf Island of arbutus bluffs and Douglas fir forest, quieter and less discovered than its Gulf Island neighbours.
I’d already done Salt Spring Island before I made it to Galiano, and I went in expecting more of the same — another long, thin Gulf Island reachable by BC Ferries from Tsawwassen or Swartz Bay, another dose of arbutus trees and Salish Sea views. What I got instead was something noticeably quieter and less developed: Galiano has one main road running most of its forty-kilometre length, almost no chain businesses, and a year-round population under a thousand that swells only modestly in summer. It felt, within an hour of arriving, like the Gulf Islands as they might have been before Salt Spring became a destination in its own right.
The island’s geography is its whole personality — it’s long, narrow, and oriented so that its western shore looks out over Trincomali Channel toward the other Gulf Islands, while pockets on the eastern side face the open strait toward the mainland. Bodega Ridge, a hike through dry Garry oak and arbutus forest along an old fault line, gives you both views within a couple of hours, the bluffs dropping straight to the water in a way that made me stop every few hundred metres just to look. Montague Harbour Provincial Park has one of the better easily accessible beaches in the southern Gulf Islands, a broad curve of white shell midden sand built up over thousands of years of Indigenous habitation, since this has been Penelakut and other Hul’qumi’num-speaking peoples’ territory for millennia.
There’s a small but serious food and wine culture that’s grown up here quietly — an actual working vineyard, a couple of excellent small farms selling produce on the honour system at roadside stands, and one bakery that a kayak guide told me, without any prompting, was “the reason I moved here,” which is a strange but not entirely unbelievable claim once you’ve had the sourdough. I rented a kayak out of Montague Harbour and paddled along the shoreline at dusk, seals surfacing at a polite distance, and had the specific feeling — rarer than it should be in BC’s more visited islands — of being somewhere genuinely uncrowded.
When to go: May through September for hiking, kayaking, and the ferry schedule at its most frequent. Avoid expecting nightlife or extensive dining options — Galiano’s appeal is precisely its lack of them.