Halifax: the port that received the Titanic victims

The Citadel of Halifax, a star-shaped fortress completed in 1856, still dominates the port today from atop the city's hill.

Descending to the sea, one walks along the waterfront, among 19th-century warehouses converted into restaurants and galleries, with cruise ships often moored right against the promenade.

A few steps away, the Atlantic Maritime Museum preserves objects recovered from the Titanic, whose nearest ship to the wreck sailed from this very port to recover the victims.

Towards evening, it's worth reaching Peggy's Cove, a solitary lighthouse on a granite coast about forty minutes from the city, among Canada's most photographed.

Many victims of the Titanic, never identified, rest to this day in Fairview Lawn cemetery in Halifax, their numbered gravestones in orderly rows forming one of the most direct testimonies to the 1912 tragedy.

Halifax also suffered one of the largest artificial explosions in history before the nuclear era, in 1917, when two ships collided in the harbor causing thousands of civilian casualties.