Winnipeg: where two rivers have met for six thousand years

Meeting point of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, used by indigenous peoples as a trading location for six thousand years before European settlers arrived.

The center, around the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, is comfortably explored on foot.

At The Forks, at the confluence of the two rivers, a covered market occupies the city's former railway warehouses.

Just steps away, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, recognizable by its glass spire called the 'Tower of Hope', was Canada's first national museum built outside the Ottawa region.

Walking on, you stroll through the Exchange District, a neighborhood of early twentieth-century terracotta warehouses, now a national historic site.

Toward evening, Assiniboine Park, with its English garden and a zoo dedicated to Arctic fauna, concludes the day far from downtown, among tree-lined paths and manicured lawns.

The Forks site was a trading place for Indigenous peoples long before any European settler set foot in what would become Winnipeg, a continuity of six thousand years rarely matched elsewhere in North America.

Winnipeg is known for having winters among the harshest of any city its size in the world, with temperatures that can plunge well below minus thirty degrees.