A Government of Gargoyles: Parliament of Canada Grotesques

August 22, 2013 — We were beat. It had been a day full of giant spiders and war machines and space aliens from a galaxy far, far away. That was our experience with Ottawa, anyway. However, even though we were tired, we didn’t want to go back to our hotel room quite yet for fear we’d never leave it. Something about having a TV, bed, mini-bar, bathroom, and room-service accessibility within five feet of you at all times makes us not want to ever move more than two.

So we just aimed at a prominent point in the sky, a tall tower with a clock, and headed toward it.

Turns out, that’s where most people were going. We were aimed at the parliament buildings of Canada, the seat of that red and white country’s government.

There are a few buildings on Parliament Hill, but the most prominent is the Center Block, with its stately Peace Tower rising 302 Canadian feet into the Canadian sky. This was the beacon that had drawn us.

Now, you can take a tour of these historic, ornate buildings, but again, we were tired, and we just wanted to hang out somewhere interesting. So that’s what we did.

But then I noticed that the place was crawling with stone creatures…and not in the out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye-did-you-see-that-am-I-going-crazy kind of way.

The buildings were covered with gargoyles and grotesques.

So, being the intrepid monster hunter that I pretend to be in front of the mirror in my bathroom, I went on a hunt…with my camera and zoom lens, the latter of which I didn’t really need since many of these beasties were set just above head height.

According to Wikipedia, there are some 370 of these fanciful and monstrous carvings all over the Canada’s government buildings. I took pictures of a ton of them, but below I’ve posted not a ton, because scrolling is one of the worst things our computer overlords make us do.

Feel free to caption them.