, showing Banff and the surrounding areas The site of Banff has been continually inhabited by
First Nations for at least 10,000 years. The town's location was the site of an
Interior Salishan settlement, which was both a wintering village and a trading post.
Nakoda and
Blackfoot peoples have also, at various points, lived at and near the present location. The town of Banff was first established in the 1880s after the transcontinental railway was built through the Bow Valley. In 1883, three
Canadian Pacific Railway workers stumbled upon a series of natural hot springs on the side of
Sulphur Mountain. In 1885, Canada established a federal reserve of around the
Cave and Basin hot springs and began promoting the area as an international resort and spa as a way to support the new railway. In 1887, the reserve area was increased to and named "Rocky Mountain Park". This was the beginning of Canada's National Park system. The Banff townsite was developed near the railway station as a service centre for tourists visiting the park. Services, such as
St George-in-the-Pines church, were constructed through the late 19th century. It was administered by the Government of Canada's national parks system until 1990 when the Town of Banff became the only
incorporated municipality within a Canadian national park.
An internment camp was set up at Banff and Castle Mountain in Dominion Park from July 1915 to July 1917, mostly imprisoning Ukrainian immigrants. The prisoners of the
internment camp were used as slave labour to build the infrastructure of the national park. In 1985, the
United Nations declared
Banff National Park, as one of the
Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks, a
UNESCO world heritage site. Banff remains one of the most popular tourist destinations in Canada. One of the most notable figures of Banff was
Norman Luxton, who was known as "Mr. Banff". He published the
Crag and Canyon newspaper, built the King Edward Hotel and the Lux Theatre, and founded the Sign of the Goat Curio Shop, which led to the development of the Luxton Museum of Plains Indians, now the Buffalo Nations Museum. He and his family helped organize the Banff Indian Days and the Banff Winter Carnival. In 1976, the
International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (IAU/WGPSN) adopted the name
Banff for a crater on Mars, after the town in Alberta. The crater is at latitude 17.7° north and longitude 30.8° west. Its diameter is . In 1991, Banff hosted the
1991 Winter Deaflympics, the first and only year that the Deaflympics was hosted in Canada. In response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, the town temporarily closed portions of its main street to vehicle traffic to create a downtown
pedestrian zone. The Banff Town Council said the pedestrian zone would stay in effect until at least 2023. == Geography ==