Banff: History

History
It started in 1883 with a stroke of luck. Railway workers building the Canadian Pacific Railway stumbled on hot springs on the slopes of Sulphur Mountain, and the government moved fast to lock in the commercial potential — Banff Hot Springs Reserve was established in 1885, a modest 26 square kilometres that became the seed of what’s now Banff National Park. Canada’s first national park, and one of the earliest anywhere in the world.

The Canadian Pacific Railway didn’t stop at discovering the springs — they built the Banff Springs Hotel in 1888 specifically to give wealthy rail travellers somewhere worth the journey, explicitly modelled on the grand mountain hotels going up in the Swiss Alps at the same time. Smart move, as it turned out.

The park’s boundaries kept expanding over the following decades, eventually reaching today’s footprint of over 6,600 square kilometres. UNESCO named it a World Heritage Site in 1984, part of the larger Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks designation — recognition both of the geology and of Banff’s role in pioneering the entire idea of a national park.

Long before any of this, the Stoney Nakoda, Blackfoot and other First Nations were using these mountain valleys for travel and seasonal hunting, going back thousands of years — a history the park’s modern interpretive programming has been working harder to properly acknowledge.