Cadboro Bay is a bay near the southern tip of

Vancouver Island Vancouver Island is an island in the northeastern Pacific Ocean and part of the Canadian province of British Columbia. The island is in length, in width at its widest point, and in total area, while are of land. The island is the largest by ...

and its adjacent neighbourhood in the municipalities of Saanich and

Oak Bay Oak Bay is a municipality incorporated in 1906 that is located on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It is one of thirteen member municipalities of the Capital Regional District, and is bordered ...

in Greater Victoria,

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

. Cadboro Bay was the site of Sungayka, a village of the

Songhees The Lekwungen or Lekungen nation (lək̓ʷəŋən often called the Songhees or Songish by non-Lekwungens) are an Indigenous North American Coast Salish people who reside on southeastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia in the Greater Victoria a ...

Nation A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective Identity (social science), identity of a group of people unde ...

for some 8,000 years prior to the relocation of its people to Victoria's Inner Harbour in the mid 1800s. The land between Gyro Park and Telegraph Bay is included in a

Douglas Treaty The Douglas Treaties, also known as the Vancouver Island Treaties or the Fort Victoria Treaties, were a series of treaties signed between certain indigenous groups on Vancouver Island and the Colony of Vancouver Island. Background With the signin ...

that is now before the courts. Cadboro Bay takes its name from the first European vessel to enter the bay, the

Hudson's Bay Company The Hudson's Bay Company (HBC; french: Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson) is a Canadian retail business group. A fur trading business for much of its existence, HBC now owns and operates retail stores in Canada. The company's namesake business di ...

schooner . During the

1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic Year 186 ( CLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Aurelius and Glabrio (or, less frequently, year 939 '' Ab urbe c ...

, which started in Victoria, thousands of indigenous people living in and around Victoria were evicted by force as smallpox spread among them. Hundreds of Haida fled one native encampment and set up another on the shore of Cadboro Bay. In May 1862 the Victoria Police Commissioner Augustus Pemberton took a police force and two recently arrived gunboats, HMS ''Grappler'' and HMS ''Forward'', to the Haida camp on Cadboro Bay. They forced about 300 natives, many already infected with smallpox, to evacuate and return to

Haida Gwaii Haida Gwaii (; hai, X̱aaydag̱a Gwaay.yaay / , literally "Islands of the Haida people") is an archipelago located between off the northern Pacific coast of Canada. The islands are separated from the mainland to the east by the shallow Heca ...

. One of the gunboats escorted the canoes north beyond Nanaimo. Today, Cadboro Bay also gives its name to the neighbourhood situated between the bay itself and the

University of Victoria The University of Victoria (UVic or Victoria) is a public research university located in the municipalities of Oak Bay and Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. The university traces its roots to Victoria College, the first post-secondary insti ...

, bounded by the Uplands district to the south, Ten Mile Point to the east and the Queenswood neighbourhood to the north. At the heart of the neighbourhood is the local centre, Cadboro Bay Village. A prominent resident of the neighbourhood in the first half of the 20th century was Frank V. Hobbs. His brother, Edwin, bought land in Cadboro Bay for a dairy farm, while Frank Hobbs engaged in business in Victoria and other parts of Vancouver Island. Upon Edwin's death, Frank moved to Cadboro Bay and became active in municipal politics and on the Victoria School Board. He was influential in expanding the provision of high schools for greater Victoria. In recognition of this and other services he provided to the area, the local elementary school, opened in 1951, was named in his honour. The

Royal Victoria Yacht Club The Royal Victoria Yacht Club is located along the shores of Cadboro Bay in The Uplands a neighborhood of Oak Bay, adjacent to the city of Victoria Victoria most commonly refers to: * Victoria (Australia), a state of the Commonwealth of Austr ...

is located on the Oak Bay side of the bay and is situated on a large archeological site of the Songhees Nation. The

is located just up the hill from Cadboro Bay, and the UVic Sailing Club maintains facilities and boats on Cadboro Bay beach for the use of its students. Cadboro Bay gives its name to a type of sea serpent, Cadborosaurus, nicknamed Caddy.

Cadboro-Gyro Park

Immediately adjacent to the beach itself is Cadboro-Gyro park. The park is popular with children in the neighbourhood as well as other parts of Victoria due to its large concrete climbing structures, in the form of an octopus, a large salmon, a tugboat and the local Cryptid, the sea monster Cadborosaurus. The park was created on of land bought from the Goward estate by the Gyro Club in 1953, which it donated to Saanich in 1954, and subsequently increased in 1961 by the expropriation of adjacent land by Saanich. The park is now . In the summer of 2014 the play area was improved, including the relocation of the octopus and salmon as well as a range of other improvements.

References

{{Coord, 48.457746, -123.292859, display=title Neighbourhoods in Saanich, British Columbia Populated places on the British Columbia Coast