The Best Hotels Near end dive, by the Record
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A boutique hotel a block from the Inner Harbour, the Magnolia leans into Victoria's Victorian mood without becoming a museum piece. Sixty-four rooms keep the scale personal, soaking tubs anchor the bathrooms, and the team has a habit of noticing when guests mention a birthday online and quietly doing something about it. Silk Road tea at turndown, locally made chocolates, hot cider in the lobby when it's cold. It holds a Michelin Key.
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The china on the afternoon tea service was a gift from the Queen in 1939, which tells you roughly everything about what kind of hotel this is. The Fairmont Empress is a grand railway-era property facing Victoria's Inner Harbour, all ivy-covered limestone and English pageantry in a city that takes its Englishness very seriously. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Key. Renovation has freshened it without sanding off the delightful self-importance.
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The pitch is a Ligurian villa somehow dropped onto a ridge above Saanich Inlet, with Vancouver Island's mountains filling every window. This resort north of Victoria has quietly shed its '80s Italianate kitsch for something more considered, and the Tuscan Spa keeps pace with the rooms. The restaurant, Alpina, runs on European technique learned in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, applied to local British Columbia ingredients, which is a stranger and more compelling idea than it sounds.
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An English manor house relocated, spiritually at least, to a 22-acre spread above Ganges Harbour on Salt Spring Island. This small luxury country house hotel runs just 18 rooms and suites, keeping things quietly unhurried in a way that larger properties can only promise. Spa treatments happen in a converted barn, the restaurant puts a Swiss chef's European training against British Columbia's seasonal larder, and the ferry ride over from Vancouver already feels like the trip beginning.
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