Where to Stay in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

What is Dartmouth known for?

Dartmouth answers to the nickname City of Lakes, and the number of them inside a community of just under fifty-nine square kilometres is what separates it from the harbour city it faces. Halifax lies straight across. The Dartmouth Sportsplex is the busiest building on the eastern shore, while Citadel Hill, HMCS Sackville and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic pull traffic the other way over Halifax Harbour.

What are the main landmarks in Dartmouth?

Halifax Harbour carries most of the register. St. Paul's Church, the Little Dutch (Deutsch) Church and St. George's Anglican (Round) Church are the oldest of the churches standing around it, and St. Mary's Basilica and Fort Massey United Church are among the larger ones. Museums sit on the far shore.

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, HMCS Sackville, the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia are a crossing away, along with Citadel Hill. The Dartmouth Sportsplex answers for the eastern shore.

What is the history of Dartmouth?

Dartmouth was founded in 1750. The community grew on the eastern shore of Halifax Harbour, facing Halifax across the water, and the two have been read as one place and two towns ever since. Water divided them.

Crossing the harbour has always been the defining problem, and everything about the way Dartmouth developed follows from its being the far shore rather than the near one. Lakes lie behind it. The fresh water inland from the harbour gave Dartmouth the City of Lakes name it still answers to.

Steeples mark where the settlement began. St. Paul's Church and the Little Dutch (Deutsch) Church go back to the first decades of settlement around the harbour, and St. George's Anglican (Round) Church, the Presbyterian Church of Saint David, Christ Church, St. Mark's Church, the Universalist Church and Victoria Road United Baptist Church were added as the shores filled in. Amalgamation came late.

Dartmouth counts as a built-up community of the Halifax Regional Municipality rather than a separate city, and its own institutions, the Dartmouth Sportsplex among them, stand alongside the provincial ones across the harbour, the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, the Naval Museum of Halifax, the Discovery Centre and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

Where is Dartmouth?

Halifax Harbour is the western edge. Dartmouth holds the eastern shore of it, just under fifty-nine square kilometres of ground inside the Halifax Regional Municipality of Nova Scotia, with Halifax directly opposite. Lakes take up the rest.

Fresh water lies scattered through the community in enough quantity to have named it, which is an odd trait in a place whose whole front is salt.

What is the climate of Dartmouth?

Halifax Harbour runs the thermostat. Salt water on one side and lakes on the other keep Dartmouth's swings narrower than its temperate band alone would suggest, holding the autumn open and pushing the spring back by weeks. The lakes freeze first.

Fresh water inland loses its heat faster than the harbour does, so winter reaches the City of Lakes side of the community before it reaches the shore.

How do you get to Dartmouth?

Everything turns on the crossing. Halifax Harbour separates Dartmouth from the city it is joined to, so arriving means either going over the water or driving the long way around the head of the harbour through the rest of the Halifax Regional Municipality. Nova Scotia's roads reach it from the landward side.

Citadel Hill and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic are minutes off by water and a good deal longer by road, which is the arithmetic every visitor here learns first.