Climate and Environment

Welcome to the City of Rainbows
That’s not a cute marketing line. It’s our actual nickname, and we earned it the hard way: by being the rainiest, cloudiest city in Canada. You don’t get rainbows without a little rain, and Rupert gets a LOT of rain. Let’s just put the numbers on the table so nobody feels misled. Rupert gets about 2,600 mm of rain a year. That’s twice what Vancouver, Seattle, or London, England sees. Roughly 240 days a year have some measurable rain, and our tourism brochures proudly advertise “100 days of sunshine,” which is a very Rupert way to frame it. Our local brewery keeps a tracker counting the days since the last rainfall, because we’d rather make a joke of it than pretend otherwise. Here’s the thing: all that rain is the reason everything around you looks the way it does. Impossibly green, lush, alive. Drought isn’t really part of the vocabulary up here. The air is clean, the ocean is at your doorstep, and we’re the only city inside the Great Bear Rainforest, which is a pretty good line to drop at parties (results may vary by party).

But when the sun comes out? GLOR-I-OUS.

Those 100 sunny days? They hit different. On a clear summer evening in Rupert, the light on the harbour goes gold, the mountains sharpen up across the channel, the whole town spills outside, and you genuinely forget any other place exists.

The sun doesn’t set until nearly 10 p.m. in June, which means dinner on the deck, a trail walk after and still catching the last of the light on the water.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: you do not get rainbows without rain. But you also don’t appreciate a sunny day quite like someone who has earned it. Rupertites know how to seize a sunny Saturday. We will drop literally anything to be outside for it. Dentist appointments, family dinners, our own weddings….