UNESCO World Heritage Sites, visit 5 in Alberta

The UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites considers 830 properties world wide as having outstanding universal value, 13 of those are in located in Canada, and 5 of those are in Alberta.

1. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

For thousands of years the native people of North America used the Buffalo to provide them with life’s necessities, meat, clothing, shelter, tools and fires. They stampeded herds over large cliffs and butchered them at the bottom where they had camps set up. The skeletal remains, at places more than 30 feet deep, are still there. At the butchering camp the remnants of meat caches and cooking pits are on top of layers of bones. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is known around the world as a remarkable testimony of prehistoric life.

2. Dinosaur Provincial Park

The first time we traveled through Alberta, the landscape suddenly changed. We felt like we had literally landed on the moon. A feeling shared by many. Strange land formations rise up on all sides, sculpted by wind and water into beautiful shapes sunbathed in terra cotta, bronze and amber. A trip to Dinosaur Provincial Park is a 75 million-year trip back in time. This region was then a subtropical paradise populated by turtles, crocodiles and sharks. Here dinosaurs once hunted and mated, and ultimately met their demise, leaving an amazingly rich fossil and bone record for us to discover today. Dinosaur Provincial Park—a world heritage site like nowhere else on earth!

3 Wood Buffalo National Park

With 44,807 square kilometers, Wood Buffalo is Canada’s largest national park. It was established in 1922 to protect the last remaining herds of bison in northern Canada. Today, it protects Canada’s Northern Boreal Plains. The largest free-roaming, self-regulating bison herds in the world, the only remaining nesting ground of the endangered whooping crane, the biologically rich Peace-Athabasca Delta, extensive salt plains, and some of the finest examples of gypsum karst topography in North America.

4 Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks

Seven parks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains have some of the best-known mountain scenery on Earth. More than nine million people annually visit the seven preserves along the Alberta-British Columbia border. There are four national parks in the ensemble — Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay. They account for most of the preserve’s 22,990 square kilometres. Adjoining them are three British Columbia provincial parks — Mount Robson, Mount Assiniboine and Hamber.

The park has a wealth of natural wonders: jagged peaks and conifer-clad slopes, silt-laden glacial streams and turquoise lakes, the vast Columbia Icefield and the complex Castleguard Caves. The Burgess Shale, in Yoho, contains one of the world’s most significant finds of soft-bodied, Middle Cambrian-age marine fossils, with about 150 species, including some bearing no resemblance to known animals.

5 Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park

The abrupt rise of the Rockies from the prairie flatlands has made the twin parks the place "where the mountains meet the prairie." Nature has provided much that is worthy of protection: high mountains and deep canyons, forest belts and prairie grasslands, deep glacial-trough lakes and rivers that feed three oceans. Diversity of wildlife - mountain goats, bighorn sheep, coyotes, grizzly bears, scores of birds, and a celebrated "international" herd of elk that migrates annually between summer mountain habitat in Glacier and winter prairie ranges in Waterton.

The highlight of Waterton’s sparkling chain of lakes is the international Upper Waterton Lake, the deepest lake in the Canadian Rockies. In 1932, the park was joined with Montana’s Glacier National Park to form the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park - a world first.

With information obtained from Canada’s Parks

Francine Gielis immigrated to Canada in 1971. She has been an employer, an employee, an importer, exporter, entrepreneur and long time volunteer. She considers herself a happy, successful and fully integrated and passionate Canadian citizen. Learn more about immigrating to and life in Canada from her website here