What to actually look at

Toronto Landmarks

The buildings and sites that define Toronto's skyline and street level — from the CN Tower down to a 19th-century castle in midtown.

Toronto's skyline is recognizable mostly because of one building, but the city's actual landmarks — the ones locals reference constantly — go well beyond it.

The CN Tower

Completed in 1975, the CN Tower stands 553.3 metres tall and was the tallest free-standing structure on Earth for 34 years, until 2007. It was built by Canadian National Railway partly as a broadcast antenna and partly as a statement about what Canadian engineering could do. It remains the single most recognizable symbol of the city, visible from most of the GTA.

Casa Loma

A genuine Gothic Revival castle in midtown Toronto, built from 1911 to 1914 for financier Sir Henry Pellatt. It's now a historic house museum with gardens, secret passages, and a conservatory — one of the few places in North America where "there's a castle" is a true, unqualified statement about a major city.

Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)

Canada's largest museum, opened in 1914, holding over 18 million items across art, world culture and natural history. Its most talked-about feature isn't inside the collection — it's the building itself: the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, a jagged aluminum-and-glass extension designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 2007, which still divides opinion on Toronto architecture message boards.

The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum — ROM / Michael Lee-Chin Crystal — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

St. Lawrence Market

A working public market on Front Street dating back to the early 19th century, repeatedly ranked among the best food markets in the world. Its signature order is the peameal bacon sandwich — officially declared Toronto's signature dish in 2016, and a direct callback to the meatpacking industry that gave the city its Hogtown nickname in the first place.

Nathan Phillips Square & City Hall

Toronto's civic square, home to the distinctive curved twin towers of the current City Hall (opened 1965) and the giant illuminated TORONTO sign that shows up in basically every tourist photo of the city. It's also where most large public gatherings, rallies and the Raptors' 2019 championship celebration happened.

Nathan Phillips Square and Toronto City Hall — Nathan Phillips Square — City of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

The Distillery District

See our neighbourhoods guide for the full picture — but it's worth listing as a landmark in its own right: a completely car-free historic district of restored Victorian industrial buildings, once the largest distillery in the British Empire.

Sources

Related dictionary terms

Hogtown The Six