The heart of Vancouver, which includes downtown, Stanley Park, Yaletown, and the West End, sits on a peninsula bordered by English Bay and the Pacific Ocean to the west; by False Creek, the inlet home to Granville Island, to the south; and by Burrard Inlet, the city's working port, to the north, where the North Shore Mountains loom. The oldest parts of the city, Gastown and Chinatown, lie at the edge of Burrard Inlet, around Main Street, which runs north-south and is roughly the dividing line between the east and west sides. All the avenues, which are numbered, have east and west designations. One note about printed Vancouver street addresses: suite numbers often appear before the street number, followed by a hyphen.

Other places of interest exist elsewhere in the city as well, such as the North Shore across Burrard Inlet, south of downtown across English Bay, and on Granville Island.