Wednesday, July 16, 2014

craigdarroch castle

Sunday was our first full day in Victoria. We walked over to the Royal BC Museum (which is just across the street from the Parliament building) and learned a little bit about Vikings and a lot of Canadian history. The Viking exhibit was very crowded and I may have been getting slightly annoyed at the people taking pictures of every. single. thing. behind. every. glass. case.
After a couple hours there, we went back and got the Jeep and drove around the outskirts of Victoria. There were a lot of beach areas and homes with waterfront views that were pretty spectacular. We ended up at Craigdarroch Castle. It was originally built in the late 1890's for a wealthy family of Scottish immigrants. It has over 20,000 square feet of living space and a total of 39 rooms. Can you imagine cleaning all that? I have a hard enough time with my 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. (Well, I'm sure this family was able to afford someone to clean it for them. They were Canada's first millionaires.) Unfortunately, the man who had it built died before it was finished.

After the family sold it, it has since been a military hospital, Victoria College, offices for the Victoria school board, and the Victoria Conservatory of Music. Now it's a pretty big tourist attraction and they are working on restoring parts of the inside. The rooms have been furnished to look like they would've back when the original family lived there. It was even used as one of the sets for the filming of Little Women back in 1994. In fact, Victoria was where quite a bit of the movie was filmed. Now I want to go rent Little Women and watch it again and see if I recognize anything.
The parlor on the first floor was huge and had one of at least four pianos that I remember seeing on our tour.
The main staircase which was fabricated in Chicago went up all four floors and each landing had huge bay windows with amazing stained glass.


Out the window you can kind of see the downtown area of Victoria.

Looking down. . .
The less formal dining room near the kitchen.
I had more pictures from inside, but they turned out really dark. You can see more here.


Now I've been inside a castle. I can check that one off my bucket list.

1 comment:

bmarquez said...

Oh my goodness! I love the new layout. Your pictures are amazing. This makes me want to travel to Canada.