What is Banff National Park?

Banff National Park is Canada's oldest national park, established on November 25, 1885 in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta. It began as a small reserve of 26 square kilometres around the Cave and Basin hot springs, three years before the Canadian Pacific Railway completed its transcontinental line through the area, and was created to keep the springs in public hands rather than private development.

The park covers 6,641 square kilometres of mountain wilderness on the eastern slopes of the Continental Divide. It contains glaciers, ice fields, dense pine forests, alpine meadows, and the turquoise lakes of Louise and Moraine. The townsite of Banff sits 1,400 metres above sea level inside the park boundary, and the resort town of Lake Louise lies 50 kilometres north along the Trans-Canada Highway.

Parks Canada, established in 1911 as the world's first national parks service, manages Banff alongside Jasper, Yoho, and Kootenay as part of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site, designated by UNESCO in 1984. The site protects habitat for grizzly and black bears, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, wolves, and the endangered woodland caribou. Indigenous peoples including the Stoney Nakoda, Ktunaxa, and Tsuut'ina have lived in and travelled through this landscape for more than ten thousand years.

Banff receives roughly four million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited national parks in North America. The Canadian government uses the park as a symbol of the country's commitment to public conservation, and images of Lake Louise and Moraine Lake appear on tourism material, postage stamps, and earlier issues of the twenty-dollar bank note. Citizenship study materials describe Banff as evidence that Canada protected its wild places early and continues to do so.