Of course, Okanagan Lake is a top-10, Insta-worthy tourism hotspot.
It's aquatic eye candy.
It's big, bold, beautiful and blue.
It's pristine and lined with parks and beaches -- the ideal launch pad for swimming and boating and watersports from wake surfing, wakeboarding, water skiing, tubing and parasailing to fishing, paddle boarding, hydrofoil and flyboarding.
And, to boot, it's also home to a mythical lake monster -- Ogopogo.
All these factors keep people constantly snapping photos of the lake and posting to the social media powerhouse of Instagram with the hashtag #okanaganlake.
Locals and visitors alike are photo happy in, on and around Okanagan Lake.
On the top-10 list, Okanagan Lake is ranked 10th and keeps company with the likes of massive tourist attractions such as the CN Tower in Toronto, Stanley Park in Vancouver, Niagara Falls, Old Montreal, Moraine Lake in Alberta and Emerald Lake in Yoho National Park.
See the full list below.
I'm surprised Moraine Lake and Emerald Lake rank higher than Okanagan Lake.
But, then, as an Okanagan boy, I'm likely biased.
It must be Moraine's and Emerald's settings in the spectacular Rocky Mountains that help put them at No. 7 and No. 9 on the list, respectively.
The list was compiled for the gambling website https://luckydays.ca/
It's a tenuous link between Instagrammable tourism hotspots and online gambling, but Lucky Days likely does it to get its name in the news.
Anyway, the Lucky Days study looked at the top 100 Canadian landmarks, sights and parks on Tripadvisor, the world's largest travel platform.
From there, it eliminated the attractions with fewer than 1,000 reviews on Tripadvisor leaving 76 of the most popular in the country.
It took those 76 and searched Instagram to find out how many times each location had been tagged in a post.
The number of tags determined the top-10 and top-30 lists.
Okanagan Lake racked up 200,484 tags, and No. 1 CN Tower and incredible 1,607,632 tags.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the CN Tower tops the list.
Not only does it literally stand out in Toronto's skyline as the loftiest building, but it used to be the tallest tower in the world, and is one of the most recognizable symbols of Toronto and Canada after the maple leaf.
In his 2018 book, Okanagan Lake: An Illustrated Exploration Above and Below the Waters, researcher and author Raphael Nowak called Okanagan the most important lake in British Columbia.
It's certainly the most important natural feature of the Okanagan at 135 kilometres long and ranging from one to five kilometres wide.
It runs from Penticton in the south to Vernon in the north with Kelowna in the middle, where arch of the Bennett Bridge spans the narrowest part of the lake, connecting Kelowna and West Kelowna.
Nowak, a UBCO frest water science graduate, also pointed out that geologically Okanagan Lake is really an inland fjord because it lays in the bed of a dramatic slip fault (aka the floor of the Okanagan Valley).
In touting the list, Lucky Days chief marketing officer Rich Lee also gives Canadian tourism a big shout out.
"An impressive 22.1 million international tourists visited Canada in 2019, according to the World Tourism Organization," he said.
"The country is renowned for tourism due to its diverse cultures, vibrant cities and natural beauty. It is also very safe, with low crime rates and a high standard of living."
