🇨🇦 Canada · The Prairies
Regina, capital of the province of Saskatchewan, rises in the middle of the immense plain of the Canadian prairies, under the huge open sky that defines this region. It is a young city that surprises you with its big central park, the Wascana Centre, one of the largest urban parks in North America, laid out around an artificial lake and the imposing provincial legislative building. If you are looking for what to see in Regina in one or two days, almost everything essential is a short walk from that park.
Regina is also the historic home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the legendary 'Mounties' in their red serge: this is where their only training academy is (the 'Depot' Division) and the RCMP Heritage Centre, which tells their story and puts on the famous Sunset Ceremonies in July, free and in the open air. The city combines its role as an administrative capital with first-rate museums, art galleries and an almost religious passion for its Canadian football team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
This guide answers what a traveler wants to know before coming: what to see in Regina, how much museum admission costs, how to get here from Saskatoon or by plane, when the Sunset Ceremonies are and how many days are worth staying. Regina is a calm, easygoing gateway to the deep Saskatchewan of endless horizons and spectacular skies.
The place where Regina stands today was known to Indigenous peoples and Métis hunters as a spot where bison bones piled up (hence its old name, 'Pile o' Bones'). In 1882 it was chosen as capital of the North-West Territories and renamed Regina ('queen' in Latin) in honor of Queen Victoria. In 1885 it was the scene of the trial and execution of the Métis leader Louis Riel. In 1905 it became the capital of the new province of Saskatchewan. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of the wheat prairies: Cree, Saulteaux and Métis land, home of the last great refuge of the bison, birthplace of Canadian medicare and of the biggest skies in Canada, with the only prairie protected as a national park.
Read the history of Saskatchewan →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The capital of Saskatchewan was born with a name nobody would put in a tourist brochure today: Pile o' Bones. Before it was a city, this point on the immense prairie was known to the Cree peoples and Métis hunters for the enormous accumulations of bison bones that piled up beside a creek. After the great hunts, the skeletons were left heaped in mounds metres high; in Cree the place was called 'oskana kâ-asastêki', which settlers garbled into 'Wascana' and translated as Pile of Bones. That name, and those bones, were the silent testimony to the end of an ancestral way of life on the plains.
Things changed in 1882, when the Canadian Pacific railway was pushing west and it was decided to establish the capital of the North-West Territories here. The choice of site, out on the open plain, with no major river, no trees and no good water supply, was the subject of fierce controversy, but it answered to interests tied to the railway and to the politics of the day (Lieutenant Governor Edgar Dewdney owned land near the chosen route). To dignify the new settlement, Princess Louise —wife of the governor general and, symbolically, the city's mother— proposed renaming it Regina, 'queen' in Latin, in honor of her mother, Queen Victoria, sovereign of the British Empire.
So a place associated with bison bones and the end of an ancestral prairie way of life came to bear the queen's name and to become, in just a few decades, the administrative centre of a vast territory in the middle of a transformation.
Regina holds a dramatic place in Canadian history through its connection to Louis Riel, leader of the Métis. After the North-West Rebellion of 1885, Riel was captured, tried in Regina and sentenced to death. His execution by hanging that same year, in the city, was a deeply divisive event that split the country between anglophones and francophones and left a wound that still echoes in Canada's memory. Today Riel is recognized as a key figure in the defence of Métis and minority rights.
The city has also been tied from very early on to the North-West Mounted Police, forerunner of today's Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). This force was created in the 19th century to impose order, enforce the law and manage relations with Indigenous peoples across the vast, changing Canadian West. Regina became a key base of the force, and in time it housed its training academy (the 'Depot' Division), where all of its cadets are trained.
The figure of the red-serge Mountie, associated with the conquest and administration of the West, became one of Canada's national symbols, and Regina, as its historic home, preserves and celebrates that legacy in its museum and in the Sunset Retreat ceremony.
In 1905, when the new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were created out of the North-West Territories, Regina was confirmed as the capital of Saskatchewan. The city then undertook major works to live up to its rank, among them the construction of the majestic legislative building, opened in 1912, and the transformation of the modest Wascana creek into an artificial lake and a large park that would become the Wascana Centre, today one of the largest urban parks in North America.
Regina lived the ups and downs of the prairies in the 20th century intensely: the agricultural prosperity of wheat that drew thousands of settlers, the brutal years of drought and dust in the Great Depression (which hit Saskatchewan as hard as almost anywhere), and episodes of social upheaval such as the Regina Riot of July 1, 1935, when the 'On-to-Ottawa Trek' —a march of unemployed men travelling from Vancouver to the capital to protest— was stopped in Regina and ended in a violent clash with police that left two dead and dozens injured.
Today Regina is a calm, functional provincial capital, the administrative, educational and cultural centre of Saskatchewan, with the University of Regina and an economy tied to agriculture, energy and services. It combines its great park and its museums with pride in the Mounted Police and an intense passion for Canadian football. Under the immense prairie sky, it is one of the best gateways to the identity of this farming province in the heart of Canada.
On Sunday June 30, 1912, while many families were heading home after an outing by Wascana Lake on a hot afternoon, the sky over south Regina turned a sickly green. At about 4:50 pm, an enormous tornado touched down south of the city and moved in a straight line between Wascana Lake and Victoria Avenue, cutting through the residential district, the commercial downtown, the train station and the warehouses, all the way to the north of the city. It lasted only a few minutes, but they were the most terrible minutes in Regina's history.
What became known as the Regina Cyclone left 28 dead and some 300 injured, and more than a century later it is still the deadliest tornado on record in Canada's history. The winds, estimated at around 400 km/h (equivalent to an F4 on the Fujita scale), destroyed some 500 buildings, many of them just finished in the young capital, flattened 200 homes and left about 2,500 people homeless. Damage was put at 1.2 million dollars of the day (tens of millions today), a huge figure for a city that barely topped 30,000 inhabitants.
What is remarkable is what came next. Regina took on heavy debt to rebuild itself in record time, and within a few years it had erased almost every scar of the disaster. The city took decades to finish paying off that reconstruction debt, but it pulled through. The cyclone of 1912 was etched into the province's collective memory as the day the fury of the prairie sky turned on the capital, and as an early lesson in the resilience that defines the character of Saskatchewan.
The identity of Regina and of Saskatchewan is shaped by farming. For decades the province was Canada's great breadbasket, and wheat defined its economy, its demographics and its character. In the early 20th century, an intense wave of migration —Ukrainians, Germans, Scandinavians, Britons and many others— settled the prairies, drawn by the promise of farmland, giving the region its characteristic cultural mix, still visible today in the churches, the food and the festivals.
Saskatchewan was also the cradle of social innovations that marked the whole country. Under the leadership of Tommy Douglas, premier of the province from 1944, Saskatchewan introduced the first public, universal health system (medicare) in North America, a model that would later spread across Canada. Regina, as the capital, was the political centre of those changes that transformed Canadians' lives.
Culturally and emotionally, few things unite Regina like the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the Canadian football team whose fans, 'Rider Nation', are legendary across the country for their loyalty and their passion, all dressed in green. Along with pride in the Mounted Police, the great open prairie sky and the Wascana Centre, the Roughriders are part of the soul of a city that, far from the big centres, has built an identity of its own and an endearing one, in the heart of Canada.