Canada’s fourth-largest city, Calgary, offers visitors unforgettable vacation with modern attractions, journey through history

Dixie Winterer stares through a window of the Calgary Tower down at a skyline of glass, steel and cranes.

In her view is the winding Bow River. Further off, on the horizon, she glimpses the snow-capped Rocky Mountains. Winterer, a visitor from California to this city in the southern Canadian province of Alberta, is standing 191 meters up in the 50-year-old tower in the heart of downtown Calgary.

“It’s so beautiful,” she says. “The river and all of the buildings. It’s just a beautiful city. We love it here.”

She and her husband drove hundreds of kilometers to Calgary from their home in the US for one main reason: the worldfamous Calgary Stampede rodeo and exhibition. The 10-day event is held in Canada’s ranching heartland every July and attracts about 1.2 million visitors.

“We’ve heard a lot about [the Stampede] from our neighbors,” she said. “They came up once about 10 years ago so they wanted to come again, so we came up in a motorhome with them.”

But Calgary, a city that is also known as “Cowtown” or “Stampede City,” is more than just a farming backwater. While ranching and agriculture are truly major parts of this Western Canadian city’s lifeblood, the city of about 1.4 million people bustles and welcomes about 7 million tourists, business travelers and other visitors every year, says Jeff Hessel, Tourism Calgary’s senior vice president of marketing.

“A lot of people come to Canada for the beautiful landscapes and the scenery,” he said. “So, they come to this area of course to see the majestic Rocky Mountains and if the people are coming to this area, they have to stop in Calgary for at least one or two days. We’ve got some fantastic events and attractions that take place here.”

Calgary is a rising metropolis and Canada’s fourth-largest city. It’s home to many national and international oil and gas firms as well as the University of Calgary, and is located near several toplevel ski resorts in the Rockies.

Like other large Canadian cities, Calgary is welcoming more visitors from China than ever before.

The year 2018 marks the Canada-China Year of Tourism,

meaning the local Chinese consulate has been teaming up with local tourism officials to boost the number of Chinese visitors to Calgary. Officials here said visits from China are up about 29 percent in Canada.

Regular direct flights from China started arriving at Calgary’s international airport in 2016.

Calgary also offers a journey through the past.

Not far from downtown, the Calgary Heritage Park Historical Village is a sprawling “living” museum built up on a mid-19th century homestead that belonged to pioneer Sam Livingston.

The park has grown into one of Calgary’s premier tourist attractions, drawing about 300,000 visitors per year, including 70,000 schoolchildren, who can wander through old-fashioned streets or ride the park’s steam-engine train.

Throughout the year, guests have the opportunity to interact with nearly 100 years of living history spanning from the 1860s fur trade to the petroleum- and automobile-dominated 1950s. The park aims to preserve the history of the early West, says Barb Munro, a spokesperson and guide at the park.

“[Livingston] built his farm here, raised his children, and many years after his death his house still remained on this property,” she said. “A group of individuals in the 1960s decided that this would be a great place to have a children’s pioneer theme park. And Heritage Park opened on July 1, 1964.”

The park also highlights the importance of the region’s First Nations and includes live demonstrations and accurate reconstructions of how life used to be like here for the Blackfoot Indians and Metis peoples.

“[The Heritage Park] is impor- tant because we tell the story of Western Canada,” Munro says. “We are the great starting place for anybody who is coming here for the first time so they can see where we came from, and who we are, and just how far we’ve come.”