This half-mile beach (800m) is a huge centerpiece for the Departure Bay neighbourhood. It's easily the best, biggest, most sandy beach in Nanaimo.
This is a great place to bring the kids (there is a playground and a grassy field) or a casual date (there are usually other people around, and the seawall pathway is an easy excuse for a stroll). You can get good coffee across the street, and more businesses are coming soon.
At high tide, there is still a good strip of sand and driftwood; at lower tides, the beach gets much bigger and you can explore sandy tidal pools, or the creek that forms shifting patterns through the sand. In the summer, this is a great place to walk through warm shallow water and look for shells and crabs, or swim out to the wooden platform.
Departure Bay History
There is a lot of history to explore here. The Snuneymuxw people had a village above the beach (Stiil'nep) with impressive longhouses that made the winters more cozy. Although the treaties signed in the 1850s left these village sites to the Snuneymuxw, by 1861 the first European settlers were pre-empting land in the area for farming, and the indigenous people were being forced onto smaller spaces in less desirable beachfronts.
The area saw more change in the 1870s when Robert Dunsmuir, who would become the richest man in Western Canada, opened his coal mines at Wellington (Diver Lake area), 4 km uphill from the beach. In order to get the coal to market he needed a railway to bring the black stone down the hill, and large wharves at tidewater for loading it onto ships.
The railway ran roughly along the path of present-day Departure Bay Road, then toward Long Lake, turning south toward the new town of Wellington which was just west of Diver Lake. The first telephone line in BC connected the mines to the wharves. And those wharves were huge - you can still see the rock "peninsulas" that underlaid the wharves, if you look north while standing at the beach (see image below).
For several decades this was a busy hub, with three-masted sailing vessels moored in the bay, the sailors spending idle time at the saloon in Departure Bay (torn down in 1941). Old documents witness the complaints of sea captains who would sometimes be tied up for days, waiting for the coal to be loaded onto their vessels. There could be as many as 35 ships in the harbour at once in those days!
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