Banff

Declared in 1885, it is Canada's first national park and the third in the world after Yellowstone and the now-abolished Mackinac. It was born of a commercial dispute: in 1883 workers on the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway came across hot springs on Sulphur Mountain, and the rival claims over who had the right to exploit them commercially led Prime Minister John A. Macdonald to settle the matter by declaring a small public reserve of barely 26 km² around the springs. The railway company itself then pushed for the park's expansion and built luxury hotels such as the Banff Springs, making conservation a tourism business from the very start. Today, together with Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay, it forms the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.