The Fraser River Delta is the flat, dyked plain of islands, farmland and tidal flats where British Columbia’s longest river, the 1,375 km (854 mi) Fraser, splits into its North, Middle and South Arms and enters the Strait of Georgia just south of Vancouver, Canada. It is home to more than 300,000 people in two cities built largely on river sediment: Richmond, on Lulu Island and Sea Island (209,937 people in 2021, on 128.87 km² of land that averages about one metre above sea level), and Delta, south of the South Arm (108,455 people in 2021). Around them lie salt marsh, the 3,500-hectare Burns Bog and mudflats at Sturgeon Bank and Roberts Bank. The estuary is a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network site of hemispheric importance, and the Alaksen National Wildlife Area and George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary on Westham Island were listed together as a Ramsar wetland on 24 May 1987. Every year the river carries about 20 million tonnes of sediment to this coast, and for at least 4,000 years people have made their living from what that river brings.
Musqueam and Tsawwassen: 4,000 years at the river mouth
The delta’s first economy was salmon, and its first towns were Coast Salish villages. The Musqueam people have lived around the mouth of the Fraser and at Point Grey for at least 4,000 years. The Marpole Midden on the North Arm, also called the Great Fraser Midden, marks the site of c̓əsnaʔəm, the largest Musqueam village about 2,500 years ago. As the delta’s channels shifted, people moved, and from roughly 1,500 years ago they settled at what is now the Musqueam 2 reserve. The river itself carries their language: Halkomelem speakers call it Sto:lo, and the English word sockeye comes from the Halkomelem name for the fish, meaning “red fish”.
On the southern edge of the delta, the Tsawwassen First Nation (“land facing the sea”) fished with tidal traps, nets and harpoons and harvested oysters, crabs, camas and cranberries across a territory that ran from Burns Bog to Point Roberts and out to the Gulf Islands. The 1846 Oregon Treaty put part of that territory inside the United States. In July 2007 Tsawwassen members ratified a modern treaty that added 400 hectares to their lands, guaranteed a share of the Fraser salmon catch and, when it took effect on 3 April 2009, made the nation self-governing. Its land now sits between the Tsawwassen ferry terminal and the Roberts Bank port, and the Tsawwassen Mills shopping centre it approved in 2012 opened on 5 October 2016.
Steveston and the salmon canneries of “Salmonopolis”
Commercial salmon canning began on the river in 1871. Steveston, on the south-western tip of Lulu Island, was laid out on a grid of 237 lots from 1880 and took its name from the Steves family who had arrived from New Brunswick. By the 1890s the lower Fraser had 45 canneries, about half of them at Steveston, which earned it the nickname Salmonopolis. Every summer, Japanese, Chinese, First Nations and European fishers and cannery workers poured into the village, and sailing ships loaded canned salmon at its wharves for export.
The Gulf of Georgia Cannery, opened in 1894, was the largest in British Columbia until 1902 and packed more than 2.5 million cans of salmon in 1897. Its last can of sockeye came off the line in 1930; it switched to herring during the Second World War and is now a National Historic Site run for Parks Canada. Japanese Canadians were central to the fleet: Tomekichi Homma settled in Steveston in 1883, and around 1897 the Fraser River Japanese Fishermen’s Association opened its own hospital when the local one refused Japanese patients. On 8 December 1941, 1,200 Japanese-Canadian fishing boats were impounded, and more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians were removed from the coast from 1942. Some returned to Steveston after internment, and the village still has a Japanese-style martial arts centre built after community talks in 1969.
Steveston is still a working harbour for fishing boats, alongside the Britannia Shipyard National Historic Site and London Heritage Farm. Across the river, Ladner began in 1868, when Thomas and William Ladner started farming, and it grew as a fishing and farming village; Delta was incorporated in 1879 with Ladner as its centre.
Farming the dyked islands of Lulu, Westham and Ladner
The delta’s silt is among the best farmland in British Columbia, and Richmond was one of the first places in the province that Europeans farmed, in the 19th century. Today the Agricultural Land Reserve protects 4,916 hectares inside Richmond as farmland, most of east Richmond; about 3,012 hectares of it are worked by 247 farms. Cranberries and blueberries are the main crops, followed by strawberries, corn and potatoes, and in 2001 Richmond held about 47 per cent of British Columbia’s cranberry acreage. In Delta, the same reserve keeps most of the flat land between Ladner and Boundary Bay in farming rather than suburbs.
Farming here depends on dykes. Richmond averages one metre above sea level, so all its main islands are ringed by dykes, and the high water table means few houses have basements. The worst floods came from spring snowmelt upstream. In June 1894 the river at Mission reached 7.85 m, and Fraser Valley communities from Chilliwack downstream went under water; afterwards a dyking system was built. Those dykes were neglected, and from 28 May 1948 they burst at Agassiz, Nicomen Island, Hatzic and elsewhere. More than 2,300 homes were destroyed and 16,000 people displaced, with Abbotsford and northern Langley hit hardest. Floods since have been smaller: high water in 1972 and 2007, and the November 2021 Pacific Northwest floods. Today’s risks are an unusually high spring freshet, or an earthquake rupturing dykes built on soft, water-soaked silt.
Sea Island, the Massey Tunnel and Roberts Bank
For a long time the delta was cut off by its own water. Ladner was linked to Richmond by a ferry until the Deas Island Tunnel, now the George Massey Tunnel, opened under the South Arm on 23 May 1959. It is the only road tunnel below sea level in Canada. The Tsawwassen ferry terminal followed in 1960, Highway 99 was rerouted through Delta in 1962, and over the next 20 years Delta’s population grew by about 400 per cent. The Alex Fraser Bridge added a crossing to North Delta in 1986.
Sea Island, between the North and Middle Arms, became Vancouver’s airport in 1929, when the city bought land there to replace the grass airstrip at Minoru Park. Vancouver International Airport now covers about 1,340 hectares and handles about 26.2 million passengers a year, second in Canada, which is why Richmond limits buildings near it to 46 m. On the outer delta, the Roberts Bank port opened in 1970 at the end of a long causeway across the tidal flats, first for coal through Westshore Terminals, which typically ships more than 20 million tonnes a year. The GCT Deltaport container terminal followed in June 1997, part of the Port of Vancouver, Canada’s busiest port.
Sockeye years: when the Fraser run fails, and when it floods back
The Fraser is Canada’s largest salmon producer, with all five Pacific salmon species plus steelhead and white sturgeon, so the size of each year’s sockeye run decides a great deal on the delta. Some damage started far upstream. In 1914 a rockslide set off by Canadian Northern Railway construction fell into the river at Hells Gate in the Fraser Canyon, speeding the current beyond what many salmon could swim. Rock was cleared in the winter of 1914–15, but biologists argue the runs were altered for good, and new fishing limits hit First Nations fishers hardest.
The modern shock came in 2009. Fisheries managers had forecast about 10.5 million returning sockeye; only about 1.37 million came back, 13 per cent of the forecast. Ottawa set up a Commission of Inquiry into the Decline of Sockeye Salmon in the Fraser River. Then, while it was holding hearings in late summer 2010, about 30 million sockeye returned, the largest run since 1913. Canadian fishers caught about 11.6 million of them.
Living beside 250 bird species at Reifel and Burns Bog
The delta’s wild places are squeezed between farms, ports and suburbs, and they are what make it internationally important. George C. Reifel bought land on Westham Island in 1927 as a farm and family retreat; his son leased it to the British Columbia Waterfowl Society in the 1960s, and in 1972 the family sold and donated it to the federal government. The 300-hectare sanctuary has recorded more than 250 bird species, including nesting sandhill cranes and bald eagles and migrating lesser snow geese and western sandpipers. The adjoining Alaksen National Wildlife Area, mostly farmland plus tidal marsh, was protected in 1976 and became Canada’s ninth Ramsar site, with Reifel, in 1987.
Burns Bog in Delta, formed after the last ice age, is the largest raised peat bog on the West Coast of the Americas. It once covered 4,000 to 4,900 hectares; about 3,500 hectares survive, home to more than 300 plant and animal species and 175 bird species, and it keeps nearby salmon creeks cool. Out on Roberts Bank, the planned port expansion has set the delta’s livelihoods against each other. Scientists say a thin film of microbes on the mudflats supplies roughly half of what migrating western sandpipers eat there. A 2020 environmental assessment found many adverse effects; the federal government approved the project in 2023 anyway, and on 10 January 2025 the Federal Court dismissed a challenge under the Species at Risk Act.
That tension is the delta’s story: a place where salmon, shorebirds, cranberry growers, airport workers and container trucks all depend on the same few hundred square kilometres of silt. To follow the river upstream to where that silt comes from, read our guide to the Fraser River, or see how deltas form in the first place.