Popular sandy beaches on warm-water lakes
The northern Okanagan has all three of the requisite “Ws” of tourism and second-home ownership that Albertans tend to seek: Wine, weather and water. Stretching from Vernon south through Peachland, the area also offers some of B.C.’s best golf courses, two of its biggest and best-known ski resorts (Vernon’s Silver Star and Kelowna’s Big White), along with popular sandy beaches on warm-water lakes. Then there’s the largest wellness resort in Canada, Sparkling Hill, which is festooned with 3.5 million Swarovski crystals worth $10 million and overlooks Lake Okanagan near Vernon. There’s a robust selection of well-known, award-winning wineries, many of them with restaurants overlooking spectacular lake vistas.
“Our real estate sales were up 76 per cent in May over last year,” says Kevin Poole, manager of economic development and tourism for the City of Vernon.
Vernon, whose latest marketing campaign into the Alberta market asks the question, “Wouldn’t you rather be in shorts?” is less than a seven-hour drive from Calgary.
“Some of that (the real estate sales resurgence) is attributed to the Alberta market coming back,” Poole says. Calgarians and other Albertans have been vacationing and investing in the north Okanagan for decades, but that has jumped with the May launch of direct daily WestJet flights from Fort McMurray into the Kelowna airport, just 25 minutes from Vernon.