But when you’re a small town not on the main highway, you have to create reasons to get people to visit it. “We needed a reason for people to want to take the freeway,” said Marie Stang, director of the Kimberley Heritage Museum.
“Just being an ordinary, nice little town was not enough.”

Five facts about Kimberley, BC – voted the best small town in BC

Kimberley, BC, was crowned the winner of Search for BC’s Best Small Town, after a seven-week competition between 128 communities. Here are five facts about Kootenay. 1:23
Today, the city is known for its skiing, mountain biking and leisure opportunities. But at its heart is the town square, which residents voted to create more than 50 years ago, voting to turn the busy Spokane Street into a pedestrian-only shopping area. It was part of the community’s name as the Bavarian city of the Rockies – the name that has largely disappeared today. However, the shopping district – known as Platzl, with intersecting cobbled alleys that run through the city center – remains a key element in making the city welcoming and one of the features that helped Kimberley win the best small town. in BC a bracket contest held by the CBC in recent weeks. “Platzl walkability encourages our visitors to socialize with residents,” said Kimberley Mayor Don McCormick.
Marie Stang, curator of the Kimberley Heritage Museum, stands next to a handmade copy of Platzl on display at the museum. ((Brendan Coulter / CBC))

Unusual tourism strategy

Platzl – the word for “square” or “town square” in the Bavarian German dialect – remains Kimberley’s largest business center, with cheese, chocolate and confectionery shops along with restaurants and a ski and bicycle shop, some of which still feature Bavarian architecture and décor. While the creation of pedestrian-only zones was something that happened in some larger cities in the 1970s, it rarely started in smaller cities, according to David Monteyne, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Calgary. “[Kimberley] “It can be unique in the sense of the scale of the city,” he said. The city’s diversification efforts became much more pressing when the Sullivan mine, once the world’s largest lead-zinc mine and the city’s largest employer, was decommissioned in 2001. Two thousand workers were laid off from the mine and the city earned $ 2 million in annual tax revenue, according to documents from Natural Resources Canada. It left the city’s business community devastated, said Matt Lamb, president of the Kimberley Chamber of Commerce. “You would have seen a lot of vacancies [in the Platzl],” he said.

Tourism is taking off

However, the community’s foresight for diversification has paid off, with tourist arrivals almost doubling in a decade, from 68,000 in 2011 to 128,000 in 2021. “We saw a complete reversal,” Lamb said. “The whole tone of the city has changed.” While the city does not track revenue generated by Platzl alone, tourism generated $ 38.2 million in 2021, much of which was generated by businesses in the pedestrian-friendly center.
Sandy James, urban planner and founder of Walk Metro Vancouver, said ski hills like Kimberley and Whistler, which have adopted car-free malls, have shown the economic benefits of building a shopping mall focused on walking. “What we have learned is that if you build a road for people to walk, people walk on it,” he said. “We are looking at the 20th century, and it was about the city of cars … but we have to stay in shape and stick to the communities.”