Is a seaside town located just north of Parksville along the Strait of Georgia. In May of 1856, an explorer of the Hudson’s Bay Company explorer and along with several aboriginal guides found a land route across Vancouver Island to the Alberni Inlet. In 1864, fellow explorer and botanist Robert Brown led another group of aboriginal tribes `to the area and found the area deserted as the result of the smallpox epidemic of 1862. For six years from 1946 to 1952, the Doukhobours, a group of Pacifist-Russian immigrants, established a communal colony in a farming area adjacent to Qualicum Beach to work at nearby farms as well as planting and growing fruit trees. Qualicum College, a private boarding school for boys, was operational here from 1935 to the late 1970s, and was considered to be one of the best boarding schools in of its kind in Canada, in terms of happiness and providing boys with the finest preparation for life. The school building remains intact and still stands to this very day, but its future remains in doubt and in absolute limbo and its playing fields have been turned into a housing and residential development. The name Qualicum is a Coast Salish language term for “where the dog salmon run” and since the early 1980s, it has a grown into a holiday cottage and retirement community as well as a popular destination for tourists. Qualicum was incorporated as a town in 1983, and has its own airport, town hall, museum and several golf courses lined throughout the vicinity of the area.
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