Long before any of that, this bay was Sungayka - snow patches, in the language of the Songhees Nation - and it was a village site for something like eight thousand years. That is not a round number thrown out for effect; it is a span of continuous habitation that predates most of what anyone considers ancient. The Songhees were relocated to Victoria's Inner Harbour in the mid-1800s as the colonial town expanded, but the ground itself keeps the record. The Royal Victoria Yacht Club on the Oak Bay side of the bay sits atop a large Songhees archaeological site, and the land stretching from Gyro Park to Telegraph Bay falls within one of the Douglas Treaties, the fourteen agreements James Douglas made with Vancouver Island nations in the 1850s whose meaning has been argued over ever since.

The English name arrived by water. The Cadboro was a Hudson's Bay Company schooner - a small vessel of seventy-one tons, one deck, two masts, and six guns - and she was the first European ship to enter this bay. That was enough to fix the label permanently. It is a modest origin for a place name, and characteristic of this coast, where an enormous number of headlands, channels, and bays carry the names of ships or the officers who sailed them rather than anything descriptive of the place itself. The Songhees name described the land. The English name described a boat that passed by.

The smallpox epidemic that swept the Pacific Northwest in 1862 began in Victoria, and the colonial response made it catastrophic. Thousands of Indigenous people camped in and around the city were forcibly evicted as the disease spread, a policy that did nothing to contain smallpox and a great deal to broadcast it along the coast. Those who fled to Cadboro Bay were not strangers passing through; they were people who had come to Victoria to trade and work, and who were expelled when they became inconvenient and frightening. Sending sick people home in open canoes did not save Victoria and it devastated the communities they returned to. The epidemic killed a large share of the Indigenous population of what is now British Columbia. The events of that May on this beach are a small piece of it, and a legible one.

Cadboro-Gyro Park now occupies the land behind the beach, and it is beloved by a couple of generations of Victoria children for four large concrete climbing sculptures: an octopus, a salmon, a tugboat, and Cadborosaurus. That last one is local. Caddy, as the alleged sea serpent is known, takes its name from this very bay, one of the rare cases of a cryptid being named for a Victoria neighbourhood rather than the other way round. The park began in 1953 when the Gyro Club bought 4.37 acres from the Goward estate and handed it to Saanich the following year; expropriation of adjacent land in 1961 brought it to its present 6.022 hectares, and the play area was reworked in 2014, with the octopus and salmon relocated. There is more here than concrete. The bay lies within the Victoria Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary and provides habitat for species listed under the Species at Risk Act, and the park holds the last population of yellow sand verbena anywhere in Saanich.

The name now also covers the neighbourhood between the bay and the University of Victoria, bounded by the Uplands to the south, Ten Mile Point east, and Queenswood north, with Cadboro Bay Village at its centre. Its most consequential twentieth-century resident was Frank V. Hobbs, who came here after his brother Edwin - who had bought land in the bay for a dairy farm - died, and who then threw himself into municipal politics and the Victoria School Board, pushing hard for more high schools across greater Victoria. The elementary school that opened here in 1951 carries his name. UVic sits just up the slope, close enough that its sailing club keeps boats on the beach, which means that on most fine afternoons the water off Sungayka is full of students learning to read the wind.