Nelson, Canada Summary

NELSON is one of British Columbia’s best towns, and one of the few interior settlements you could happily spend two or three days in – longer if you use it as a base for touring the Kootenays by car. The town is home to more than its share of baby-boomers and refugees from the 1960s, a hangover that’s nurtured a friendly, civilized and close-knit community, a healthy cultural scene and a liveliness – manifest in alternative cafés, nightlife and secondhand-clothes shops – that you’ll be hard pushed to find elsewhere in the province outside Vancouver. There are, apparently, more artists and craftspeople here per head of the nine thousand population than any other town in Canada. At the same time it’s a young place permeated with immense civic pride, which was given a further boost by the filming here of Roxanne, Steve Martin’s spoof version of _ Cyrano de Bergerac_. Producers chose the town for its idyllic lakeside setting and 350-plus homes from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth-century, factors which for once live up to the Canadian talent for hyperbole – in this case a claim to be “Queen of the Kootenays” and “Heritage Capital of Western Canada”.