Europeans appeared on the scene in notable numbers during the eighteenth century, when Spanish explorers charted the waters along what is now southwestern British Columbia. In 1778 Captain James Cook reached nearby Nootka Sound while searching for the Northwest Passage, sparking off immediate British interest in the area. In 1791 Jose Maria Narvaez, a Spanish pilot and surveyor, glimpsed the mouth of the Fraser from his ship, the Santa Saturnia . This led to wrangles between the British and Spanish, disputes quickly settled in Britain's favour when Spain became domestically embroiled in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Captain George Vancouver officially claimed the land for Britain in 1792, but studying the Fraser from a small boat decided that it seemed too shallow to be of practical use. Instead he rounded a headland to the north, sailing into a deep natural port - the future site of Vancouver - which he named Burrard after one of his companions. He then traded briefly with several Squamish tribespeople at X'ay'xi, a village on the inlet's forested headland - the future Stanley Park. Afterwards the Squamish named the spot Whul-whul-Lay-ton, or "place of the white man". Vancouver sailed on, having spent just a day in the region - scant homage to an area that was to be named after him a century later.

Vancouver's error over the Fraser was uncovered in 1808, when Scottish-born Simon Fraser made an epic 1368-kilometre journey down the river from the Rockies to the sea. In 1827 the Hudson's Bay Company set up a fur-trading post at Fort Langley , 48km east of the present city, bartering not only furs but also salmon from the Sto:lo, the latter being salted and then packed off to company forts across Canada. The fort was kept free of homesteaders, despite being the area's first major white settlement, their presence deemed detrimental to the fur trade. Major colonization of the area only came after the Fraser River and Cariboo gold rushes in 1858, when New Westminster bustled with the arrival of as many as 25,000 hopefuls, many of whom were refugees from the 1849 Californian rush. Many also drifted in from the US, underlining the fragility of the national border and the precarious nature of British claims to the region. These claims were consolidated when British Columbia was declared a crown colony, with New Westminster as its capital. Both were superseded by Fort Victoria in 1868, by which time the gold rush had dwindled almost to nothing.

In 1862, meanwhile, three British prospectors, unable to find gold in the interior, bought a strip of land on the southern shore of Burrard Inlet and - shortsightedly, given the amount of lumber around - started a brickworks. This soon gave way to the Hastings Sawmill and a shantytown of bars which by 1867 had taken the name of Gastown , after "Gassy" - as in loquacious - Jack Leighton, proprietor of the site's first saloon. Two years later Gastown became incorporated as the town of Granville and prospered on the back of its timber and small coal deposits. The birth of the present city dates to 1884, when the Canadian Pacific Railway decided to make it the terminus of its transcontinental railway. In 1886, on a whim of the CPR president, Granville was renamed Vancouver, only to be destroyed on June 13 that year when fire razed all but half a dozen buildings. The setback proved short-lived, and since the arrival of the first train from Montreal in 1887 the city has never looked back.