Hidden Cemeteries & Forgotten Burial Grounds

Neighbourhood: Various · Address: Various — see each cemetery · Hours: Necropolis: daily dawn to dusk. St. James: daily. Mount Pleasant: daily 8am–8pm · Price Range: Free

Why Visit

Toronto's cemeteries double as peaceful urban green spaces with haunting Gothic architecture and celebrity graves scattered among towering old-growth trees. They’re a quiet lens into the city’s strange, sometimes macabre past.

What Makes It Unique

These burial sites are surprisingly central yet almost invisible: Potter’s Field lies beneath Yorkville’s chic sidewalks, and Necropolis feels like it’s in the 19th century despite its downtown location. The elaborate mausoleums, tangled gravestones, and design details (like the Necropolis’s rainbow windows) set them apart from parks or historic sites you’d expect in the core.

If you want to see a version of Toronto that feels quieter, older, and a little more self-contained, spend a few hours among the city’s old cemeteries and forgotten burial grounds. They’re not gloomy in the way people expect. Most of the time they feel calm, practical, and oddly social in a low-key Toronto way: joggers circling the perimeter, dog walkers keeping to the paths, photographers crouching for angles, birders scanning the trees, and the occasional person sitting on a bench as if they’ve come there to think through something. The dead are the obvious reason these places exist, but the living are always part of the scene too.

The best place to start is the Toronto Necropolis in Cabbagetown, at 200 Winchester. It’s one of the city’s most beautiful cemeteries, and also one of the most atmospheric because it never feels overrun. The entrance alone tells you what kind of place this is: a Gothic Revival gate and chapel designed by Henry Langley in 1872, with pointed arches, dark stone, and enough ornament to make the whole thing feel slightly theatrical without crossing into costume. Once you’re inside, the mood changes fast. The traffic noise falls away, the paths curve under mature trees, and suddenly you’re walking through Victorian Toronto in a way that feels more direct than any museum exhibit. Some monuments are elaborate beyond reason, with angels, carved drapery, obelisks, and family vaults that look like tiny temples. Others are simple, weathered, and easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. That contrast is part of what makes the place so affecting. You’re not just looking at fancy stonework; you’re moving through a record of the city’s families, epidemics, infant deaths, public servants, tradespeople, and people whose names never made it into the tourist version of Toronto.

The Necropolis is especially good in fall. The leaves turn, the stone warms up in the late afternoon light, and the whole place starts to look almost too photogenic. If you like taking pictures, go later in the day when the shadows are longer and the monuments have more texture. In spring, the trees make it feel softer and more alive, which is a strange thing to say about a cemetery, but it’s true. It’s also free, open daily from dawn to dusk, and only about a 10-minute walk from Broadview Station, so it’s easy to get to without planning an entire outing around it. If you’re only going to one cemetery in Toronto, this is the one I’d send you to first.

St. James Cemetery has a different feel. It’s older in an orderly, Anglican sort of way, dating to 1844, with tidy lanes, sturdy old markers, and a Gothic chapel that looks especially good under a grey sky. It doesn’t have quite the same drama as the Necropolis, and it’s not as sprawling as Mount Pleasant, but it has a quiet authority that’s hard to fake. It feels like early Toronto in the way it holds itself together: formal, restrained, and very sure of the rules that shaped the city when it was still smaller and more self-conscious. If you care about the city’s early development, or you just like seeing how burial customs changed before Toronto spread outward, it’s worth a stop. It’s also a good one to pair with other east-end wandering if you’re already in the area, since it doesn’t demand a huge time commitment.

Then there’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, which is on a completely different scale. At 200 acres, it’s less like a cemetery you “visit” and more like a huge park that happens to contain some of the city’s most ornate monuments. The landscape alone makes it feel unusual. Ravines, mature trees, winding roads, and older sections that still feel formal, all mixing together in a way that doesn’t quite read as cemetery at first glance. People use it constantly: runners, dog walkers, photographers, birders, and casual walkers who’ve figured out that it’s one of the calmest places in midtown. It’s one of the best urban birding sites in Toronto too, which is not a gimmick. In spring migration especially, you can see warblers, woodpeckers, thrushes, and plenty of other species moving through the canopy. If you’re into birds, bring binoculars and give yourself time to slow down. If you’re not into birds, you’ll probably become aware of them anyway, because the place is so full of movement once you start noticing it. The monuments here range from grand and sculptural to restrained and elegant, and the scale of the grounds means you can have stretches of near-total quiet even when other people are around. It’s free, open daily from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and about a 15-minute walk from Eglinton Station, though I’d recommend more time than that suggests. An hour is the minimum. Two hours is better if you like wandering without an agenda.

And then there’s Potter’s Field, which is the one that stays with you for a different reason. It isn’t really a cemetery anymore, which is exactly what makes it so unsettling. Near Yonge and Bloor, this was once a paupers’ burial ground, and it was paved over in the 1880s and turned into parkland. Today people cross it casually, sit on it, pass through on their way somewhere else, and most have no idea what’s underneath. That erasure is part of Toronto too. The city is full of places where old uses are still present if you know how to look, but invisible if you don’t. Potter’s Field doesn’t offer the visual drama of the Necropolis or the scale of Mount Pleasant. What it offers is the uncomfortable reminder that some of the city’s dead were simply removed from view.

What makes these places different from other Toronto attractions is that they don’t try to package themselves too neatly. There’s no ticket line, no gift shop pressure, no scheduled performance telling you what to feel. You show up, walk slowly, and pay attention. The experience depends a lot on your pace and on the weather. On a bright, crisp afternoon, the stonework can look almost celebratory, especially in the Necropolis, where the old trees filter the light and the monuments catch the sun in a way that makes everything feel sharp. On a cloudy day, the same places can feel more solemn and more cinematic. Early mornings are best if you want to be alone. Late afternoons are better if you want the light to do half the work for you. Weekends are busier, especially at Mount Pleasant, where it’s normal to share the grounds with walkers and birders. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean you should adjust your expectations. These aren’t abandoned places. They’re active public spaces with a lot of quiet traffic.

The neighbourhood context matters too. Cabbagetown gives the Necropolis a nice urban edge; you’re never far from houses, side streets, or the everyday hum of the city, which makes the cemetery feel even more like a pocket of old Toronto preserved inside the present one. St. James sits in a part of the city that still feels connected to the older downtown grid, so it has that formal, slightly institutional air that fits its age. Mount Pleasant stretches across midtown and feels almost like a green corridor cutting through the city rather than a bounded site. Each one is shaped by what surrounds it, and that’s part of why they don’t feel interchangeable. Toronto has a lot of green space, but these places carry a different kind of quiet because the landscape is tied to memory, names, and the city’s own changing shape.

If you’re planning a visit, the best strategy is to keep it simple. Wear comfortable shoes because the paths are longer than they look, and some of the best monuments are farther in than you’d expect. Bring water if it’s warm, especially at Mount Pleasant, where you can end up wandering longer than planned. Don’t rush the photography. A lot of the best details are small: a cracked inscription, a carved hand, a family plot tucked under a tree, the way moss softens a stone base, or the contrast between a polished mausoleum and a marker that’s nearly sunk into the ground. You don’t need to know much ahead of time to enjoy these places, but it helps to stay open to the fact that they’re not only about famous names or spectacular architecture. They’re also about ordinary lives and the city’s habit of forgetting and preserving at the same time.

If you like history, architecture, birding, or just walking somewhere peaceful without spending money, this is one of the best ways to see a side of Toronto most visitors miss. The Necropolis is the most atmospheric and probably the least visited of the major ones. St. James is the most formal. Mount Pleasant is the biggest and the best for wandering. Potter’s Field is the one that makes you think hardest after you leave. Together, they tell you something important about Toronto: that the city’s oldest stories aren’t always in the obvious places, and that some of the most revealing parts of town are the ones people pass every day without looking twice.