The iPhone and Android app plays each story when you reach the place it is about, on foot, by bike or by car, and works without a signal.

VICTORIA, B.C., September 2026. Camena, an audio-tour app built in Victoria by developer Diogo Travassos, is now available on the App Store and Google Play. The launch catalogue covers Victoria and Vancouver Island, and it opens with a free 27-stop walk around the Inner Harbour and old town narrated in eight languages.

The app uses the phone's location to start each story as the listener reaches the place it describes, and to stop it when they move on. There is nothing to tap along the way: choose a tour, download it, put the phone in a pocket and go. Skip a stop and the tour carries on; double back and the story is still there. Audio, route and stop details download before setting out, so the narration runs without cell service. Live street-map imagery may still need a connection.

"I wanted the phone out of the way," said Travassos. "You should be looking at the building, not at a screen telling you about the building."

The free Inner Harbour walk is a 3.3-kilometre loop from the causeway that takes in Thunderbird Park, the Parliament Buildings, Bastion Square and Market Square. It takes about 50 minutes at walking pace, longer with photo stops. Its stories cover the 25-year-old architect who drew the harbour's skyline, the fur-trade fort that talked its way into becoming a capital, the gold rush that flooded the harbour with thousands of strangers in a single summer, and the Lekwungen shore that carried a name for thousands of years before any of it. Narration runs in English, French, Chinese, German, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish and Japanese, so a newcomer, a visiting relative and a lifelong resident can walk the same route in their own language.

The languages came first. Travassos moved to Victoria from Brazil by way of Vancouver, and the app began as a way to show family visiting from overseas what the Island is made of. "I looked for something that already did this, and nothing got to where I needed. None of it ran in other languages, so my family could not follow along," he said. "The languages are not a feature I added later. They are the reason I started."

Every stop is researched against sources before a word is written, and the research is kept. Stops are placed against the real route rather than guessed from an address, and pacing is set by how fast the listener is actually moving, so a cycling tour is not written like a walk. The research, the narration and the app are all made in-house in Victoria; nothing in the catalogue is licensed from an existing tour operator.

Three further tours follow the same pattern: a half-day walk built for cruise passengers, a Galloping Goose cycling tour, and a Victoria–Nanaimo drive along Highway 1 narrated separately in each direction. Each is a one-time purchase with no subscription. Vancouver, Whistler and the rest of British Columbia are planned for later this year.

Camena is free to download on the App Store and Google Play. Every tour page at camena.tours carries a route map, the full stop list and an English audio sample with a transcript.

Camena is built by one person in Victoria, British Columbia, and is a product of Finback Digital Inc.