Halifax

Pier 21, the Citadel noon gun and the Alderney ferry in a weekend

Central Halifax is a walking city, and a weekend is enough. Start at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, where about a million newcomers arrived between 1928 and 1971, walk the waterfront boardwalk past HMCS Sackville and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, climb Citadel Hill for the noon gun, and cross the harbour on the Alderney ferry.

Walk north along the boardwalk past the tall ships and stop at HMCS Sackville, the Second World War corvette moored by the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. Inside, see the Halifax Explosion gallery and the Titanic wreckage. Climb to the Citadel before noon to watch the daily gun fire from the ramparts and spend the afternoon among the barracks. Walk down Spring Garden Road to the Public Gardens and finish with dinner and a drink on Argyle Street.

On day two, cross the Grand Parade to St. Paul's Church, the oldest building in the city, and wander through the Old Burying Ground, in use from 1749 to 1843. Take the Alderney ferry across to Dartmouth for the view of the downtown skyline from the water, and stroll the Dartmouth waterfront trail before coming back. In the afternoon, walk the Victorian streets of the South End to Point Pleasant Park for forest trails and old gun batteries at the mouth of the harbour.

Spend the evening in the North End. Eat on Agricola Street, walk through the Hydrostone, the garden-city district built after the 1917 explosion, and, if you are still hungry at midnight, end the way Haligonians do, with a donair.

Quinpool donairs, Seaport Market chowder and Digby scallops

Halifax eats from the sea, but its official food since 2015 is the donair: spiced beef shaved off a cone, wrapped in pita with onion and tomato and a sweet garlic sauce made with condensed milk. Late-night donair shops cluster on Quinpool Road and Blowers Street, and the Seaport Farmers' Market serves chowder and Digby scallops.

The donair, adapted from Turkish döner in the 1970s, is spiced beef shaved off a cone, wrapped in a pita with onions and tomato and drowned in a sweet garlic sauce made with condensed milk. The corner of Blowers and Grafton streets, known locally as Pizza Corner, is where the late-night queues form, and Quinpool Road has its own long-standing shops.

Mussels steamed in white wine or beer appear on almost every menu and are good value, and Digby scallops from the Bay of Fundy are large, sweet and best seared quickly. A bowl of seafood chowder with haddock, scallops and shrimp is the standard lunch on the boardwalk, and a lobster roll in summer is worth the splurge. Whole lobster costs a lot in restaurants; the church and community lobster suppers held in the warmer months across the province are a cheaper and friendlier alternative.

On Saturday mornings, go to the Halifax Seaport Farmers' Market at Pier 20, beside Pier 21, for oatcakes, smoked fish, local cheese and Annapolis Valley apples. Garrison Brewing has a taproom nearby, and Alexander Keith's, founded in 1820, still runs its historic brewery on Lower Water Street. For dessert, try blueberry grunt, a stewed-berry pudding topped with dumplings, when you see it on a menu.

Day trip from Halifax to Peggy's Cove, Mahone Bay and Lunenburg

Rent a car or join a coach tour for a day on the South Shore, because public transport does not properly serve Peggy's Cove or Lunenburg. Peggy's Cove, under an hour from downtown on Highway 333, has painted houses and a white-and-red lighthouse on bare granite; Mahone Bay's church steeples and Lunenburg's painted waterfront follow.

Leave early and head west on Highway 333 along St. Margarets Bay. Arrive before nine or after the tour coaches leave, and keep well back from the dark, wet rock near the water, where waves have swept people into the sea. Just up the road, a quiet memorial on the shore remembers the 229 people killed when Swissair Flight 111 crashed offshore in 1998.

Continue along the coast to Mahone Bay, where three churches line up along the waterfront in a famous postcard view. Its old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, keeps the British colonial grid laid out in 1753, with painted wooden houses climbing the hill from the harbour. The Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic sits on the waterfront, and the Bluenose II, the replica of Canada's most famous racing schooner, uses Lunenburg as its home port when it is not touring. The drive back on Highway 103 takes about 1.5 hours.

In summer, the coast can be foggy even when the city is clear, so pack a layer. Autumn brings colour to the woods along the way and thinner crowds after mid-October.