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Welcome to Tofino Guide
The intent of this website is to offer Tofino, BC visitors and residents and in-depth and accurate reference for accommodations, restaurants, popular activities like whale watching, sea kayaking and surfing. We also strive to provide pertinent information about directions, the region's weather, tides and surfing conditions.
Over the past 11 years, this website has tried to offer objective and accurate information to our visitors. Last year, we purchased the "Original Tofino Insiders Guide" to add valuable information about hiking and sightseeing to our list of accommodation and activity providers. Together, the co-authors of this website share over 60 years in the food, tourism and hospitality industries.
We hope that by using the information provided here before or during your visit, we will enable you to see, to appreciate and to respect Tofino and Clayoquot Sound exactly as we value them, as residents the whole year round. We would like to stress that the opinions and reviews expressed within these pages are ours and may differ with your personal discoveries. Please let us know if you feel we should take another, perhaps more closer look at any of the information we have provided.
A portion of the proceeds from this business goes directly to local preservation-minded organizations to ensure the protection and future sustainability of this environmental treasure we call home. 2008 marks our 12th year online. We now see over 30,000 visitors to our website every month. Thanks for bringing us along!
-Your Tofino Guides, 2008
A Brief Tofino History
Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations People have made Clayoquot Sound their home for several thousand years. The Tla-o-qui-aht Village of Opitsaht (across the water from Tofino on Meares Island) is thought to have been continuously inhabited for at least the past 5,000 years according to carbon dating performed on a buried stash of discarded clamshells there.
During the European exploration of Vancouver Island by Captains Galiano and Valdez, the site of Tofino was named in 1792 after a Spanish hydrographer that accompanied the expedition. His name was Don Vincente Tofino and he came from Cadiz, Spain. As “recently” as 1875, Captain Pinney established a trading post on Clayoquot Island just across the water to your left (when standing on the First Street Dock).
Tofino homesteaders eventually shifted from the island to the peninsula after the turn of the century where it could grow inside bigger bounds. The Anglican Church (still standing, Second Street and Main) was built in 1913 after the Church of England provided funds and instruction for a church to be built on the most beautiful spot on Vancouver Island. Understandably, Tofino was chosen.
Earning the nickname "Tough City" for its long, rainy and tempest winters, Tofino was primarily a maritime trading town until the 1950s when a logging road was punched through the mountains between Port Alberni and the coast.
Early tourists, eager to reach the ocean, were only permitted to use the logging road on weekends... [Read the rest of this article]
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