Toronto Waterfront Guide: Harbourfront, Islands, and Lake Ontario

Toronto's Lake Ontario waterfront stretches 46 kilometres along the city's southern edge, anchored at its centre by the Harbourfront Centre — a cultural complex on the former port lands that runs an extraordinary programme of free and ticketed events across water, music, dance, film, and visual arts throughout the year. The waterfront connects the CN Tower precinct to the west through Harbourfront to the revitalised Portlands in the east, offering the most varied public amenity in the city.

The Toronto Islands — a chain of small islands accessible by ferry from the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal at the foot of Bay Street — provide the essential Toronto summer experience: a 13-minute ferry crossing delivers you to a car-free, tree-shaded archipelago of beaches, lagoons, cycling paths, and the LGBTQ+-friendly Hanlan's Point naturist beach that offers the most unusual urban beach experience in North America. The island park is open year-round but at its best from June through September.

The Portlands waterfront to the east of the Sugar Beach precinct is undergoing the largest urban transformation in Toronto's history — a flood protection project that is creating new parkland, a revived urban river (the Don River naturalisation), and new mixed-use neighbourhoods that will add kilometres of new waterfront by the late 2020s. The progress of the transformation can be observed from the new Villiers Island public space that opened in 2023.