Alberta, Canada

Alberta is oil money and cowboys and the most beautiful mountain scenery in the country, and it has never had any difficulty reconciling those three things. Calgary is the corporate and Stampede city, Edmonton is the northern government-and-university city that runs festivals all summer, Banff and Jasper are the national parks that the rest of the world recognises from photographs, Lake Louise is the turquoise postcard, and Drumheller is the badlands with the dinosaur bones that half the world's museums are built from.

The province's character is the most American in Canada — low taxes, no provincial sales tax, a genuine frontier self-image, and a political culture that is proudly to the right of everywhere else. The chinooks warm Calgary's winter by twenty degrees in an afternoon and everybody explains them at length. The mountains are an hour from the city and the population genuinely skis.

Expect real cowboy-and-oil confidence, genuine mountain content, and a province that considers itself the engine of the country and is correct about it.

Nearby: Calgary Edmonton British Columbia Saskatchewan