Museum of Anthropology: Tickets and Hours
Say it plainly because so much old content gets this wrong: the Museum of Anthropology reopened 13 June 2024 after an 18-month seismic upgrade, and by now it’s been fully open for over two years. Adult admission is CAD 26, the Great Hall’s glass-walled wall of Northwest Coast totem poles is worth the trip out to UBC on its own, and this is genuinely one of the best museums in Canada, not just a campus curiosity. It slots into a Vancouver visit as a half-day trip out from downtown, not a whole day.
Key facts
| Price | CAD 26 adult, CAD 23 senior/non-UBC student, CAD 13 youth 6-18, free under 6 and for UBC students/staff |
| Hours | 10am-5pm, Thursdays until 9pm, closed Mondays October through May |
| Getting there | Bus 99 or 44 from downtown, 40-50 min, or about 25 min by car |
| Booking | Half-price Thursday evenings 5-9pm; book ahead for those slots specifically |
Getting there and getting in
MOA sits on the UBC Point Grey campus, about 15km and 40-50 minutes from downtown by Bus 99 B-Line or Bus 44, or roughly 25 minutes by car. That distance is the single biggest reason people skip it, and it’s the wrong instinct: nothing downtown matches the scale of what’s inside. Check current hours and any special exhibition tickets on the official MOA site before you go, especially around the Thursday evening half-price window, which fills up.
The Great Hall
Glass-walled and stacked with totem poles, house posts, and carved feast dishes from First Nations of the Northwest Coast, some poles dating to the 19th century, others recent commissions. The scale doesn’t come through in photos, you have to stand in the room. Bill Reid’s Raven and the First Men, a 4.5-tonne yellow cedar sculpture showing Raven coaxing the first humans out of a giant clamshell, sits in the rotunda, the same image that spent years on the Canadian $20 bill, and it’s more striking in person than any bill or photo suggests.
Is the Museum of Anthropology actually still closed?
No. It reopened 13 June 2024 after an 18-month, roughly $30.5 million seismic upgrade to the Great Hall, and has now been running normally for over two years. If you’ve read anything calling it closed or under construction, that information is out of date; plan your visit as you would any fully operating museum.
The Multiversity Galleries and current exhibitions
Open visible storage holds over 40,000 objects from cultures worldwide, and staff will pull specific items on request, a genuinely unusual level of access for a museum this size. The rotating exhibition programme changes through the year, so check the current listing on the official site before you go rather than relying on a fixed name here.
What’s around campus worth adding to the trip?
Pacific Spirit Regional Park wraps the campus with 73km of forest trails, Nitobe Memorial Garden, a traditional Japanese garden, charges a small entry fee (roughly CAD 7) and is free on Monday mornings, and Wreck Beach at the campus’s western edge (about 500 stairs down, clothing-optional) is worth a look from the clifftop even if you skip the descent. Give the museum 90 minutes to two hours and the surrounding campus another hour or two if the weather’s cooperating.
Where to eat nearby
The museum cafe covers sandwiches and light lunches. UBC Village, a 10-minute walk away, has better options for a proper meal. For something more distinctive, Salmon n’ Bannock in Vancouver’s Fairview neighborhood is the city’s standout for Indigenous Canadian cuisine, bannock and salmon done both traditionally and contemporarily, and worth the trip back into the city afterward.
Compare downtown Vancouver hotel rates on Booking.com if you’re basing yourself centrally and treating MOA as a half-day trip out and back.