13% of the city is parkland
Toronto Parks & Green Space
A car-free island park in Lake Ontario, a 400-acre park with an endangered oak savannah, and a converted brick quarry turned environmental centre — Toronto's green space is stranger and better than its skyline suggests.
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Parks and green space cover roughly 13% of Toronto's land area — over 8,000 hectares, ranging from formal Victorian-designed lawns to actual Carolinian forest.
Toronto Islands
A car-free archipelago of small islands just offshore in Lake Ontario, reachable only by ferry (or, in recent years, a pedestrian/cyclist bridge to one island), with beaches, historic cottages, and the best unobstructed view of the Toronto skyline anywhere.
High Park
At nearly 400 acres, Toronto's largest and best-known park, donated to the city in 1873 by architect John George Howard and opened in 1876. It contains a rare and endangered black oak savannah ecosystem, a small zoo, sports fields, and — every spring — some of the city's most-photographed cherry blossoms.
The Don Valley and Evergreen Brick Works
The Don River valley cuts a genuinely wild green corridor through the middle of the city. Its most distinctive landmark is the Evergreen Brick Works: a former industrial quarry and brick factory — the same one that supplied the bricks for Casa Loma, Massey Hall and the Ontario Legislature — converted since 2010 into Canada's first large-scale community environmental centre.
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