Book Niagara-On-The-Lake attraction tickets

Few places in Ontario wear their history as visibly as Niagara-on-the-Lake. Sitting at the point where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario, this compact town was the first capital of Upper Canada and later bore the brunt of American forces during the War of 1812, a conflict that left it burned to the ground before it was painstakingly rebuilt. That rebuilding produced one of the best-preserved examples of early nineteenth-century townscape in North America, and the result is a main street, Queen Street, lined with Georgian and Regency-era architecture that functions as a living record rather than a reconstruction.

The town draws two distinct kinds of visitor, and both leave satisfied. Theatre-goers come for the Shaw Festival, one of Canada's most respected repertory companies, which occupies several venues in town and dedicates its programme to the works of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. The festival runs through the warmer months and has shaped the cultural identity of the town as decisively as the wineries that surround it. Those wineries are the other great draw, and they are not incidental to the landscape here: the Niagara Peninsula sits within a designated viticultural area where the moderating influence of both the lake and the river creates conditions that suit cool-climate varieties, particularly Riesling, Chardonnay, and the ice wine for which the region has earned an international reputation.