Homes for Sale in Highlands, BC

Living in Highlands

The District of Highlands was incorporated in 1993, the culmination of years of effort by residents of the forested area west of Langford who wanted to preserve the rural character of their community against the development pressure that was already transforming the Western Communities. The municipality's founding was essentially a planning decision — incorporation gave the community the tools to maintain large minimum lot sizes, restrict commercial development, and govern its own growth rather than having those decisions made by a regional district or an adjacent municipality with different priorities. The result is a CRD municipality that shares borders with Langford (one of BC's fastest-growing communities) and Colwood without sharing their development trajectory, maintaining a forested residential character that visitors from the east end of the Trans-Canada consistently find surprising.

Thetis Lake Regional Park on the Highlands-Langford boundary is the community's most used public space — the two lakes and their arbutus and Garry oak shoreline trails draw swimmers, hikers, and dog walkers from across the Western Communities in a park that demonstrates what the natural character of this part of Vancouver Island looked like before the highway corridor was built. The Bear Mountain Golf & Country Club resort development in Highlands' southeastern corner represents a negotiated exception to the municipality's rural character — a destination resort development approved over some community objection that has brought commercial amenity and traffic to an area that previously had neither. The Goldstream Provincial Park boundary on the Highlands southern edge provides old-growth forest and the Goldstream River salmon run that draws visitors every November when chum and coho return to spawn in one of the CRD's most accessible wild salmon events.

For buyers, Highlands represents the CRD's estate living proposition at its most committed — forested lots of a size that other CRD municipalities no longer have available at any price, with the privacy and natural setting that large lot size delivers in a municipality that has protected its character by deliberate policy. Langford's commercial services are immediately adjacent when needed; downtown Victoria is 20 to 30 minutes east. The price reflects both the lot size and the scarcity that Highlands' planning has maintained, and buyers should expect that character to continue as long as the municipality's residents continue voting to preserve it.