Fifteen islands a ferry ride offshore, with no cars, a residential community that fought eviction for forty years, and the best view of the skyline.
The Islands are a sandbar built up over thousands of years from sediment eroded off the Scarborough Bluffs and carried west by the lake current. Until 1858 they were a peninsula; a storm cut through the neck and made them islands.
There are no cars. There are around 260 homes, about 700 residents, a school, a church, and no shops to speak of.
The ferries
Three routes from the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal at the foot of Bay Street, all a fifteen-minute crossing:
Ward’s Island — the eastern, residential end. Quiet, with a small café and the start of the boardwalk.
Centre Island — the middle, with Centreville amusement park, the pier, the formal gardens and the crowds. This is the family ferry.
Hanlan’s Point — the western end, with the airport at its tip and Hanlan’s Beach, which has been clothing-optional since 1999 and unofficially long before that. It is also where the first Toronto Pride picnic was held in 1971.
Ferries run frequently in summer and less so in winter, when only the Ward’s Island service is reliable. Buy tickets online in advance in summer — queues at the terminal on a hot Saturday run to an hour.
There is also a water taxi service, which costs more and does not queue.
What is out there
Beaches — Ward’s, Centre Island, Gibraltar Point and Hanlan’s. The water is clean enough to swim and is tested daily; Lake Ontario in August is around 20°C.
Bike hire at Centre Island, or bring your own on the ferry. The islands are flat and about six kilometres end to end, which makes cycling the sensible way to see them.
Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, from 1808, the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Great Lakes, with a story about its first keeper being murdered by soldiers over bootleg beer that is unproven and repeated constantly.
The skyline view from the southern shore, looking back across the harbour, is the classic photograph of Toronto and is considerably better than any view from inside the city.
The residents’ fight
Homes were built on the islands from the 1880s. From the 1950s, Metro Toronto set about clearing them for parkland, and demolished several hundred houses.
The remaining residents on Ward’s and Algonquin resisted for decades, including a physical blockade of the bridge in 1980 when the sheriff came with eviction notices. In 1993 the province granted them 99-year land leases, ending the fight.
The community is still there and it is a genuine neighbourhood, not a display. Walk through it quietly.
Practicalities
No cars, no cash machines and very few shops. Bring what you need.
Summer weekends are extremely busy. Weekday mornings are close to empty.
The islands flooded badly in 2017 and 2019 and were partly closed; lake levels are worth checking in spring.
More Landmarks
CN Tower
553 metres of concrete built to fix a television reception problem, with a glass floor and an option to walk around the outside.
Casa Loma
A ninety-eight-room Gothic Revival folly built by a financier who lost it to unpaid taxes within a decade.
Fort York
The garrison the town was founded around, where the Americans blew up the magazine in 1813 and started a chain of events that burned Washington.