Toronto city tours offered by Global Alliance allow our clients to experience Canada’s largest metropolis in comfort from the seat of one of our luxurious vehicles with an experienced chauffeur as a guide, with the further option to be dropped off to explore Toronto’s many attractions on their own. Today, a few of the city’s prominent cultural landmarks that may well constitute a portion of your tour will be detailed.

Art Gallery of Ontario

Toronto’s pre-eminent art museum boasts one of the largest and most diverse collections in the country and is frequently home to blockbuster touring exhibitions. No art museum anywhere can boast a larger or finer collection of Canadian art, with a focus on the iconic works of the Group of Seven. The AGO also features beautiful works of European and international art, as well as drawings, prints, and other fine objects. It’s also an architectural landmark thanks to a striking recent renovation headed by world-renowned (and Toronto born and raised) architect Frank Gehry. His curving glass facade on Dundas Street has elegantly brought the gallery into the 21st Century as well as provided the city of his birth with another public highlight. Architectural aficionados will also appreciate a contemporary addition to the adjacent Ontario College of Art and Design: the Sharp Centre for Design resembles a checkerboard box supported four storeys above Grange Park by thin coloured pillars.

Royal Ontario Museum

First opened to the public in 1914, the Royal Ontario Museum (colloquially known as the ROM) is celebrating its centenary in 2014, so what better time to visit one of the largest and finest museums of world culture and natural history in North America? In addition to major touring exhibitions, the ROM features thousands of fascinating artifacts from prehistoric times to the Ancient and Medieval world through Canada’s early centuries of Aboriginal and European settlement. The natural history galleries, especially the innovative Biodiversity Gallery and classic Bat Cave, are popular with children, while young adult visitors may want to acquire tickets for the museum’s popular summertime Friday Night Live series, when the halls and galleries are transformed into the city’s grandest nightclub. The ROM is also now a daring architectural eye-catcher thanks to the 2007 addition of the Crystal, a jagged, striking design by Daniel Libeskind that renewed and expanded the original Neo-Romanesque building. Jutting out from the ROM’s north facade over Bloor Street, it’s a memorable construction, to be sure.

Gardiner Museum

Just across Queen’s Park from the Royal Ontario Museum is the quieter but uniquely interesting Gardiner Museum. Devoted exclusively to ceramic arts, the Gardiner Museum holds over 2,900 pieces from across Europe, Asia, and the Americas and also hosts three temporary exhibitions per year. It offers established (or potential) connoisseurs of fine art objects a rewarding cultural experience away from the larger crowds of the ROM and the AGO, and is a recommended alternative (or addition) to your city itinerary.