Halifax Audio Tours

Halifax sits on one of the world's great natural harbours, and the harbour has been both its reason for existing and its recurring point of contact with catastrophe. The 1917 Halifax Explosion, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel in the Narrows and detonated 2,900 tonnes of explosives, remains the largest accidental non-nuclear explosion in history. It flattened the north end of the city, killed nearly 2,000 people, and sent a tsunami wave into Dartmouth on the opposite shore. The Bedford Institute of Oceanography now occupies the area where the explosion ship lay, and the Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower stands in Fort Needham Park above the former disaster zone.

Citadel Hill, the star-shaped British fortress on the hill above downtown built in its current form between 1828 and 1856, is the defining feature of the skyline and offers views across the harbour to Dartmouth.

The waterfront boardwalk running from the ferry terminal south through the Historic Properties, a collection of warehouses from the early 19th century, is one of the more pleasant harbour walks in Atlantic Canada, lined with restaurants and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic where the SS Acadia and recovered Titanic artifacts are on permanent display. Halifax was among the ports that retrieved bodies and wreckage from the Titanic disaster in 1912, and that connection runs deep in the local historical consciousness.