Three Canadian Pacific Railway workers stumbled onto a set of hot mineral springs on Sulphur Mountain in 1883 while surveying the route through the Bow River Valley, a discovery general manager William Cornelius Van Horne moved quickly to capitalize on. Van Horne saw hotels as the key to filling his trains, famously reasoning that since the railway couldn’t export Canada’s scenery, it would have to import tourists instead.
He commissioned New York architect Bruce Price to design a Châteauesque castle where the Bow and Spray rivers meet, and it opened June 1, 1888, the second in what became a chain of grand CPR hotels across the country. The original wooden structure burned down in 1926, and the stone castle standing today was rebuilt in its place shortly after. Beyond building the hotel, Van Horne also petitioned Ottawa to protect the surrounding land, helping establish Banff as Canada’s first national park. The hotel became a National Historic Site in 1988, exactly a century after it opened.