🇨🇦 Canada · The Prairies
Saskatoon is the largest city in Saskatchewan, set on both banks of the South Saskatchewan River, in the middle of the Canadian prairie. Known as the 'Bridge City' for the several bridges crossing the river, its great signature is its green riverbanks (the Meewasin Valley): a long corridor of parks and trails along the water that is the city's pride and the centre of its outdoor life. If you are looking for what to see in Saskatoon, almost everything revolves around that river.
A university city with a young feel, Saskatoon combines its riverside nature with a growing cultural and food scene, first-rate museums and a strong First Peoples cultural presence. On the outskirts, Wanuskewin Heritage Park, a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage list, offers one of the best windows onto the thousands of years of Indigenous history on the northern plains of America.
This guide answers what people look up before travelling: what to see in Saskatoon, how much admission to Wanuskewin and the museums costs, how to get there from Regina or by plane, when to go and how many days to stay. From the river valley and its parks to the Picasso collection at the Remai Modern, Saskatoon is a pleasant and increasingly lively base for discovering the heart of Saskatchewan.
The South Saskatchewan River region was for thousands of years the territory of plains peoples (Cree and others), as the Wanuskewin site attests. The city of Saskatoon was born in the 1880s as a colony of a temperance society (abstinence from alcohol) that came from Ontario, and owes its name to the saskatoon berry, a wild fruit of the region, in the Cree language. With the railway and immigration it grew into the province's main city. 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 history of Saskatoon holds a curious paradox: the largest city in Saskatchewan was born, in theory, so that nobody would drink. But that late 19th-century founding is only the last chapter of a much longer story. Long before the city existed, the South Saskatchewan River valley was for thousands of years the territory of the peoples of the northern plains. The extraordinary Wanuskewin site, on the outskirts of today's Saskatoon, preserves the proof of that long presence: remains of more than six thousand years of human occupation — older than the pyramids of Egypt — with buffalo jumps (cliffs used to drive bison herds to their death), campsites, tipi rings and a medicine wheel.
These peoples, among them the Cree and other prairie nations, lived in close relationship with the bison, which gave them food, shelter, tools and the materials for their ceremonies. The river valley, with its water, its shelter from the wind and its abundance of resources, was a prime place to camp, hunt and gather, generation after generation.
That ancient heritage, far from being only archaeology, is still alive in the culture of the region's First Nations and is passed on today in places like Wanuskewin. The city's own name, taken from the saskatoon berry (of Cree origin), recalls that Indigenous root that came before any European settlement.
Modern Saskatoon has an unusual origin. In the 1880s, a group of Methodists from Ontario, keen to found a community free of alcohol, organized the Temperance Colonization Society and obtained land on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River to establish a colony where drinking alcohol would be banned. The first settlers arrived in 1883 and founded the settlement that would give rise to the city.
The name chosen, 'Saskatoon', comes from the saskatoon berry, a wild fruit abundant in the region, whose name derives from a Cree word. So the new colony took a name with Indigenous roots tied to the land it occupied. The beginnings were hard: isolation, a harsh climate and long distances made the small settlement slow to grow in its first years.
Everything changed with the arrival of the railway and the great wave of immigration that populated the prairies in the early 20th century. Saskatoon became a rail junction and a service centre for the settlers arriving from Europe and other parts of Canada, and its population shot up, leaving behind its modest origin as a temperance colony.
With the prairie boom, Saskatoon grew quickly as a farming and commercial centre. The building of several bridges over the South Saskatchewan River, needed to join the banks and the different settlements that merged into the city, earned it the nickname 'Bridge City'. In 1907 the University of Saskatchewan was established, and its beautiful stone campus on the riverbank became an educational, scientific and cultural engine that would shape the young, dynamic character of the city.
Through the 20th century, Saskatoon lived the ups and downs of a prairie economy dependent on farming, but it also benefited from the province's resources, such as potash and other minerals, which diversified its economic base. The city overtook the capital, Regina, in population, establishing itself as the largest in Saskatchewan.
In recent decades, Saskatoon has committed to making the most of its great natural asset — the river and the Meewasin valley — with a long corridor of parks and trails, and to strengthening its cultural scene with institutions like the Remai Modern and music festivals. At the same time, it has given growing prominence to First Peoples culture, with Wanuskewin as its emblem. Today it is a city of river, university and prairie, firmly asserting its identity.
If anything defines Saskatoon it is its river. The South Saskatchewan crosses the city from south to north and, for decades, its banks were an underused asset. That changed in 1979 with the creation of the Meewasin Valley Authority, a body dedicated to protecting the river valley and making the most of it. The word 'meewasin' means 'beautiful' in the Cree language, and the project set out to preserve exactly that: the natural beauty of the river corridor in the face of urban pressure.
Since then the Meewasin Trail has been developed, an extensive network of paths on both banks connecting parks, lookouts, gardens and neighbourhoods, which has become the main recreation space for local people. The Meewasin interpretive centre, the riverside parks and the conservation of prairie and riverbank woodland ecosystems have made Saskatoon a standout case of integration between city and river on the Canadian prairies.
This approach has strengthened Saskatoon's identity as a 'green city on a river'. Historic bridges, such as the 1907 Traffic Bridge (rebuilt and reopened in 2018), sit alongside new public spaces by the water. Betting on the river has also been a bet on quality of life and on a form of urban tourism based on nature and the outdoors.
Over the past two decades, Saskatoon has gone through a remarkable cultural reinvention. The opening of the Remai Modern in 2017, on the riverbank, gave the city an art gallery of international standing, famous for its collection of Picasso linocuts and ceramics. Add to that a booming food scene in neighbourhoods like Broadway and Riversdale, jazz, folk and theatre festivals (the Fringe), and a nightlife driven by the university presence.
At the same time, the city and the region have given growing prominence to First Nations culture. Wanuskewin Heritage Park, run in close partnership with Indigenous communities, not only preserves a heritage thousands of years old but is a living space of cultural transmission and a candidate for the UNESCO World Heritage list. The reintroduction of a bison herd in 2019 was a symbolic milestone of reconnection with the history of the plains.
Today Saskatoon presents itself as a young, diverse, growing city that combines its prairie heritage, its unusual origin as a temperance colony and its Indigenous root with a contemporary outlook. The river is still its backbone, and the coexistence of nature, culture and First Peoples memory defines its identity looking ahead.