There are two ways into the Manitoba Legislative Building at 450 Broadway, and both of them are free. You can walk in on your own, any day of the year, and wander the public floors with a printed route sheet. Or you can take the guided tour, which is also free but has to be reserved and runs on a schedule that changes twice a year. Most visitors turn up expecting the first and would have preferred the second, so it pays to know how the two differ before you plan an afternoon around either.

Self-guided access is the simpler of the two. The building is open to visitors every day, from eight in the morning until eight at night, and the Legislative Assembly publishes a self-guided route sheet you can follow at your own pace. This is a working legislature rather than a museum, which has one practical consequence at the door: every visitor eighteen or older has to show government-issued photo identification to get in. Bring a driver's licence or a passport and leave extra time if your group is large.

The guided tour is the better visit if you can get on one. A guide takes you through the rooms a route sheet can only describe, and the tour is capped at thirty people, so reservations are strongly recommended rather than optional. Free tickets go through the booking link on the Legislative Assembly's visiting page. In summer the program is generous: tours run every day, roughly hourly between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, and no reservation is needed. From autumn through to the end of spring the program shrinks to a handful of slots a week, with Monday and Friday afternoons the reliable ones in the most recent published schedule and a late-morning Friday tour as well. If you are bringing more than ten people, the tour office asks for two weeks of notice and handles those bookings by email at tour_reservation@mbassembly.ca rather than through the public booking page.

Before you go: The tour schedule is not the same in November as it is in July, and the winter timetable is reissued each year. Check the current days and times on the Legislative Assembly's visiting page at gov.mb.ca before you build an afternoon around a tour, and reserve if you can.

The staircase, the star and the Golden Boy

What you are walking into is a 1920s Beaux-Arts building made almost entirely of Tyndall stone, the mottled limestone quarried at Garson, northeast of the city. It is on the outside walls and across much of the interior, and it is full of fossils. Look at the stone at hand height on a staircase or a door surround and you will find them, the shells and burrows of a shallow tropical sea that sat over Manitoba a very long time before the prairie did. Nobody points this out on the way in. It is the best thing about the building if you like looking closely at things.

At the foot of the grand staircase stand two life-size North American plains bison, cast in bronze by Georges Gardet and weighing 2,268 kilograms apiece. The staircase itself is Botticino marble, the brown-veined Italian kind, and it climbs to the rotunda. Stand at the rail there and look down. Below you is a circular room directly under the dome with an eight-pointed black marble star set into its floor, the Pool of the Black Star, with the rotunda's ceiling open above it. Then look up, because the alignment continues: the Golden Boy stands 73 metres above that star, at the top of the dome.

He is worth a word on his own. The statue went up on 21 November 1919, measures 5.25 metres from toe to the tip of his torch, and was not gold at first. He was gilded in 1948. From the ground on Broadway he reads as a small figure on a tall dome; from directly beneath, in the rotunda, the scale of what is holding him up is the part that registers.

If the architecture itself is what draws you, there is also a separately run evening tour of the building, the Hermetic Code tour, built on the Masonic and classical symbolism a researcher traced through the design. It is ticketed, it is sold by Heartland Travel rather than by the Legislative Assembly, and its public dates come and go depending on what access the building allows in a given year. Check with Heartland Travel rather than assuming it is running.

The Broadway stop, and November light

The building sits on the north side of Broadway between Osborne Street and Memorial Boulevard, with its grounds running down toward the Assiniboine. By bus, the stop you want is Broadway at Osborne, signed for the Legislature, which is served by the D14, D15 and D19. The D19 is the Corydon route, which makes this an easy trip from the south side of the river without a transfer. Check the trip planner the morning you go; Osborne and Broadway is a corridor that picks up detours.

Timing matters more in late autumn than people expect. By the second week of November the sun is down in Winnipeg before five in the afternoon, which rules out seeing the grounds, the facade and the Golden Boy in daylight if you also want a two-o'clock tour. Go at eleven if you want both. The flip side is that the building is floodlit after dark and the walk along Broadway under the elms is better at night than the photographs suggest. In January, add the wind: Memorial Boulevard runs straight north from the grounds with nothing to break it.

Our three-bedroom house is in Crescentwood, on the other side of the Assiniboine from the Legislature. The D19 runs downtown from Corydon and stops at Broadway and Osborne on the way, so most guests who go do it by bus and are back for dinner. Our Airbnb listing has the dates.