Vaughan Audioguides

Vaughan is a city of striking contrasts. The Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, which opened around its subway station in 2017, represents one of the most ambitious planned urban cores built in Canada in recent decades, a dense cluster of towers and pedestrian plazas rising from former farm fields north of Toronto. A few kilometers northwest, the village of Kleinburg has barely changed since the 19th century, with heritage buildings along Nashville Road and the extraordinary McMichael Canadian Art Collection housed in a log-and-fieldstone complex set among ten acres of Humber River forest.

The McMichael is reason enough to come to Vaughan.

The collection was founded on works donated by Robert and Signe McMichael and focuses on the Group of Seven and their contemporaries, the painters who traveled into the Canadian wilderness in the early 20th century and came back with canvases that defined how Canadians see their own landscape. Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, and Emily Carr are all here, the birch groves and northern lakes rendered with a directness that earns the building's forest setting. Vaughan also has the distinction of hosting Canada's Wonderland, one of the country's largest amusement parks, which has operated at the junction of Highway 400 since 1981.