Three days in Winnipeg: a river junction people have been meeting at for six thousand years

Start at the point itself. The Forks is the ground where the two rivers meet, and it has been a meeting place for six thousand years, a fur trade post, a rail yard, and now a market in converted stables with riverside paths running off in three directions. Archaeology under the site has turned up hearths and tool caches going back millennia. It is where the city goes on a Saturday.

Above it stands the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which opened in 2014 as the first national museum built outside Ottawa and the first anywhere devoted solely to human rights. Antoine Predock designed it as roots of Manitoba limestone under a cloud of glass, with a hundred metre tower rising out of the top and a route through the galleries that climbs continuously on alabaster ramps from dark at the bottom to light at the top. The galleries on Indigenous rights and on residential schools are the ones people come out quiet from. Give it three hours.

Walk out over the Esplanade Riel afterwards, a cable-stayed footbridge to St Boniface with a restaurant hanging off the middle of it, and come back for dinner on the west bank.

The Manitoba Museum is ten minutes north in the Exchange District and is much stranger and better than a provincial museum has any right to be. Its nine galleries run from the Hudson Bay coast to the boreal forest to the prairie, and the centrepiece is a full-size reconstruction of the Nonsuch, the seventeenth century ketch whose fur trading voyage led to the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company, built in England for the company's tercentenary and sailed here. You walk around it in a mocked-up dockside street.

Then southwest to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the oldest civic gallery in western Canada, which in 2021 added Qaumajuq alongside it: a white curved building whose ground floor is taken up by a three-storey glass vault holding thousands of Inuit carvings, visible from the street. It is the largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art in the world and there is nothing else that looks like it.

Finish at the Legislature five minutes away. On the outside it is a competent 1920 neoclassical pile with a gilded figure on the dome, known to everyone as the Golden Boy, holding a sheaf of wheat and a torch. On the inside it is one of the odder buildings in Canada: the proportions, the numbers of steps, the pairs of bison, and the Latin inscriptions have all been read as deliberate hermetic and Masonic design, and there is a tour that takes that seriously.

Eat in the Exchange or on Osborne Street south of the river.

Cross the river for the last morning. St Boniface is the French quarter and the oldest European settlement in the west, and it is a genuinely different place: the street signs, the schools and a good deal of the conversation are in French, and the community here descends from the Métis and from Quebecois settlers who came out with the fur trade.

The museum is the oldest building in Winnipeg, an 1840s convent built by the Grey Nuns from oak logs, and it is said to be the largest oak log structure in North America. Inside is the Métis and francophone history of the province, told by the people it happened to.

A hundred metres away stands the cathedral, or rather two of them. The basilica of 1908 burned in 1968 and rather than clear the site they left the stone facade and the front wall standing as a ruin, and built the new church inside the shell. The effect from the front steps is unusual and very good. In the churchyard in front of it is the grave of Louis Riel, the Métis leader who founded Manitoba, led two resistances against Ottawa and was hanged for treason in 1885. Whether he was a traitor or a father of Confederation is an argument Canada has still not finished.

From here it is fifteen minutes back over the bridge to downtown, or twenty-five to the airport.