Comox Valley

The Comox Valley is a lowland region on the east coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. It takes in the city of Courtenay, the town of Comox, the village of Cumberland and several unincorporated settlements, among them Royston, Union Bay, Fanny Bay, Black Creek and Merville, and the communities of Denman Island and Hornby Island are also counted as part of it. The valley floor has deep alluvial soil, with mountains to the west beneath the Comox Glacier and beaches along the Strait of Georgia to the east. Three Indigenous groups, the Comox, the Pentlatch and the Lekwiltok, farmed and cleared the land before the first European settlers arrived in 1861, when the colonial governor encouraged newcomers to take up its agricultural potential. Its metropolitan area held about 76,000 people in 2022.