Craigdarroch Castle

Robert Dunsmuir emigrated from Scotland to Vancouver Island in 1851 and dug himself into a fortune — by 1883 his coal mines were earning $500,000 a year. In the late 1880s he commissioned architect Warren Heywood Williams to build the family a 'bonanza castle' on 28 acres in Victoria's Rockland neighbourhood: a four-storey Scottish Baronial mansion of BC granite, San Francisco tile, and an oak staircase prefabricated in Chicago, wrapped in some of North America's finest Victorian stained glass.

Neither the patron nor the architect saw it finished. Dunsmuir died in April 1889, seventeen months before completion; Williams died too, and his associate Arthur L. Smith carried on. His sons Alexander and James finished the 39-room, 25,000-square-foot castle at a cost believed to reach $500,000 — and his widow Joan lived there as a near-recluse until 1908.

What followed reads like a parable of boom and bust: the estate sold for $38,000, subdivided, and the castle itself raffled off for $1 tickets. It served as a military hospital, Victoria College, and a conservatory of music before the Craigdarroch Castle Historical Museum Society restored it and opened it in 1979. A National Historic Site of Canada, it now draws 150,000 visitors a year — the grandest Victorian house on Canada's west coast.