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Parks Canada reported attendance for 119 places in the 2025-26 fiscal year. Banff National Park alone drew 4,558,171 visits, which is more than the 99 least visited places on the list put together. Those 99 places are 83 per cent of the system.
The file is plain. Two columns, one row per place, a number for the year that ran from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026. Parks Canada published it on 4 June 2026 through the federal open data portal, under the Open Government Licence. It does not come with a summary, a chart or a single percentage. It is a list.
Run the arithmetic on that list and the shape of the system appears immediately. Total reported attendance was 26,197,628 visits across 119 places. Banff took 17.4 per cent of it. Jasper National Park took another 9.1 per cent. Between them, two addresses in the Alberta Rockies account for 26.5 per cent of every recorded visit to a Canadian national park, national historic site, canal or marine park.
Seven places carry half the system
Sort the 119 places from largest to smallest and start adding. You pass the halfway mark at the seventh entry. Seven places, 5.9 per cent of the list, hold 50 per cent of the visits.
Those seven are Banff, Jasper, the Fortifications of Québec, the Lachine Canal, Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park and the Halifax Citadel. Keep going and the top 10 reach 63.8 per cent. The top 20 reach 83.3 per cent.
The average place on the list recorded 220,148 visits. The median place recorded 23,783. The average is 9.3 times the median, which is what happens when a handful of entries are very large and most are not. If you only ever saw the average, you would picture a system of mid-sized destinations. That system does not exist.
Splitting the list by what kind of place it is makes the pattern sharper, and this is the cut the source file does not provide.
| Type of place | Places | Share of places | Visits | Share of visits | Median visits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| National parks and park reserves | 39 | 32.8% | 15,734,792 | 60.1% | 75,659 |
| National historic sites | 75 | 63.0% | 8,774,492 | 33.5% | 17,163 |
| Canals, marine and heritage places | 5 | 4.2% | 1,688,344 | 6.4% | 220,239 |
Historic sites are almost two thirds of the places and one third of the visits. Fifty-nine per cent of them sit below the system-wide median. The big exceptions are urban and they are big: the Fortifications of Québec at 2,224,062 visits, the Lachine Canal at 1,492,668, the Halifax Citadel at 1,088,705, the Rideau Canal at 888,454. A historic site in a city centre behaves like a park. A historic site reached by float plane does not.
The bottom of the list is not a failing grade
Thirty-nine places recorded fewer than 10,000 visits in the whole year. Together they account for 126,965 visits, or 0.49 per cent of the total. Banff by itself is 35.9 times all of them combined.
It would be easy to read that as neglect. The geography says otherwise. Quttinirpaaq National Park, at the bottom with 11 visitors for the year, sits on northern Ellesmere Island. Parks Canada’s own visitor page says the park is most easily reached by chartered aircraft from Resolute Bay, that it is most accessible from May to August, and that visitors must be experienced and self-reliant. Aulavik and Tuktut Nogait recorded 14 each. Sirmilik recorded 44. Wapusk recorded 81. These are not places that lost an audience. They are places where getting there is the entire problem.
Some of the smallest numbers on the list belong to places that are actively staffed and cared for. SGang Gwaay Llnagaay, the Haida village site on the southern edge of Haida Gwaii, recorded 1,965 visits. The wider Gwaii Haanas reserve recorded 3,276.
The care behind those numbers has a name attached to it. In 1973, a Haida man known as Captain Gold taught himself to paddle a canoe and travelled to SGang Gwaay, in his words, “to take care of the ancestors”, as Shanna Baker reported for Hakai Magazine in 2017. He worked the site largely on his own for years, keeping the forest off the carved poles and watching for looters. Baker’s piece traces the Haida Gwaii Watchmen programme back to that work.
The programme is still running. The Council of the Haida Nation dates it to 1982 and posts Watchmen at five village sites from spring to fall. Parks Canada describes the programme as managed by the Council with federal financial support, staffed from May to September by Haida men and women, from teenagers to elders. Roughly 2,000 people a year arrive at SGang Gwaay and are met by someone whose job is that site. Banff received 2,320 times as many visitors. Nobody would run the two the same way.
Two places called Lachine, 396 times apart
The single strangest pair in the file shares a name. The Lachine Canal National Historic Site recorded 1,492,668 visits. The Fur Trade at Lachine National Historic Site, a stone warehouse beside the same canal in the same borough of Montreal, recorded 3,767. One is 396 times the other.
Banff contains a smaller version of the same gap. Banff Park Museum National Historic Site, inside the town, recorded 51,600 visits. That is 1.13 per cent of the park it sits in. Roughly one visitor in 88 who came to Banff went through the museum door.
Neither pair is a mystery once you look at what is being counted. A canal path through a dense city collects everyone who walks or cycles it. A building collects only the people who go inside. The attendance column mixes both kinds of place without flagging which is which, and that is worth holding on to before treating the figures as a popularity ranking. Attendance is a count of arrivals, not a verdict, which is the same caution that applies when a company reports attendance in its quarterly results.
What the data cannot show
Five places reported no figure at all. Gros Morne National Park and the Trent-Severn Waterway are marked UR, unable to report. The Battle of the Châteauguay, Cartier-Brébeuf and Sir Wilfrid Laurier historic sites are marked TC, temporarily closed. All five are excluded from every calculation above. Gros Morne is a large park and its absence is not trivial, so treat the 26.2 million total as covering 119 places, not the whole system.
The file also does not explain anything. It carries arrivals and nothing else. It has no spending figure, no length of stay, no residence of the visitor, no method note describing how a canal path count compares with a gate count at a museum. Any explanation of why the distribution looks like this, whether it is roads, marketing, airfare, proximity to a major airport or something else, is not in this dataset. We are not asserting one.
One practical thing does fall out of the numbers. The official list of Parks Canada places is far longer than the list most itineraries use, and the quiet end of it is very quiet indeed. If the appeal of a trip is having the place mostly to yourself, the file is a decent map of where that is still possible. It is the same instinct behind the places worth going back to that never show up on the main circuit. Season matters as much as choice of destination here, which we covered separately in our guide to the best time to visit Canada, and travellers arriving from Latin America can sometimes reach the gateway cities more cheaply through free stopover programmes.
Before you go
The places at the quiet end of this list are, almost by definition, a long way from a major airport. A stuffable travel pillow packs flat and gets filled with clothing you are already carrying, which is the practical argument for it on a trip with a long flight and a longer drive at the other end.
Frequently asked questions
How many places does Parks Canada report attendance for?
The 2025-26 file lists 124 rows. Of those, 119 carry a reported number. Two are marked UR, unable to report, and three are marked TC, temporarily closed.
Which Parks Canada place had the most visitors in 2025-26?
Banff National Park, with 4,558,171 visits, or 17.4 per cent of all reported attendance. Jasper National Park was second with 2,392,849.
Which Canadian national park has the fewest visitors?
Of the parks that reported, Quttinirpaaq National Park on Ellesmere Island recorded the fewest, with 11 visitors for the entire year. Aulavik and Tuktut Nogait each recorded 14.
Why do some Parks Canada sites show no attendance number?
The file uses two codes. UR means the place was unable to report a figure for the year, and TC means it was temporarily closed. Parks Canada does not explain the individual cases in the dataset itself.
Sources and method
From the source. Attendance figures come from Parks Canada attendance 2025_26, published on the Open Government Portal on 4 June 2026, temporal coverage 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, Open Government Licence. We downloaded the English CSV directly rather than working from a summary. Access conditions for Quttinirpaaq come from Parks Canada’s visitor page for that park. Details of the Haida Gwaii Watchmen programme come from the Council of the Haida Nation and Parks Canada. The account of Captain Gold’s 1973 journey to SGang Gwaay, and the single quoted phrase, come from Shanna Baker’s 2017 feature for Hakai Magazine, credited above and paraphrased otherwise.
Raw POV’s own analysis. Parks Canada publishes the raw column and no derived figures. Every percentage, ratio, median and grouping in this piece was calculated by us from the CSV: the 26,197,628 total across 119 reporting places; Banff at 17.4 per cent and Banff plus Jasper at 26.5 per cent; the finding that the 99 least visited places sum to 4,387,334, which is 170,837 fewer visits than Banff alone, or 3.9 per cent less; the count of seven places needed to pass half the total; the top 10 and top 20 shares of 63.8 and 83.3 per cent; the median of 23,783 against a mean of 220,148; the 39 places under 10,000 visits at 0.49 per cent of the total; the breakdown by type of place in the table; and the Lachine ratio of 396 to 1 and the Banff museum ratio of 88 to 1.
Judgement calls we made, so you can check them. One entry, Kejimkujik, is both a national park and a national historic site. We counted it once, as a park. Mount Revelstoke and Glacier are reported on a single line and counted as one place. The five UR and TC entries are excluded from every calculation. The CSV is encoded in Latin-1 rather than UTF-8, which will corrupt accented place names if it is read as UTF-8, so we decoded it accordingly.
What we did not establish. The dataset records arrivals only. It does not explain the concentration, and we have not attributed it to any cause. It also does not describe how counting methods differ between an open canal path and a building with a door, which is a real limit on comparing those two kinds of entry directly.
