Ottawa — Capital of Canada

Ottawa became Canada's capital in 1857 not because it was the largest or most established city in the colonies of the time — Toronto, Quebec City, Montreal, and Kingston were all larger contenders with stronger claims — but specifically because Queen Victoria chose it as a compromise. The colonial legislature of the United Province of Canada had cycled the capital among rival cities for years, unable to agree, and had asked the Queen to settle the dispute; she picked the small logging town then known as Bytown, reportedly valuing its position straddling the border between English-speaking Canada West and French-speaking Canada East, and its relative safety from American attack, being farther from the border than Montreal or Toronto.

The city had been founded decades earlier, in 1826, as Bytown, named for Lieutenant Colonel John By, the Royal Engineers officer who oversaw construction of the Rideau Canal — a 202-kilometer waterway built after the War of 1812 as a secure military supply route between Montreal and Kingston that would bypass the exposed St. Lawrence River corridor along the American border. The town was renamed Ottawa in 1855, after the Odawa people and the Ottawa River along which it sits, shortly before Queen Victoria's selection made it the seat of government two years later.

Parliament Hill's Gothic Revival Centre Block, whose original building was largely destroyed by fire in 1916 and rebuilt by 1922 (with the Peace Tower completed in 1927), sits on a bluff overlooking the Ottawa River, a site chosen for its defensibility and views rather than for proximity to the city's original commercial core, which had grown up around the canal locks below.

Ottawa's bicultural, binational position — English on one side of the river in Ontario, French-speaking Gatineau, Quebec, directly across it — echoes the very compromise that led to its selection as capital in the first place, and the city today functions as the seat of Canada's federal government, home to Parliament, the Supreme Court, and most federal departments, while remaining considerably smaller in population and economic weight than Toronto or Montreal.

The Rideau Canal that gave the city its original reason for existing is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, in winter, becomes the world's largest naturally frozen skating rink, drawing skaters the length of the canal through the heart of the capital — a recreational use its original military engineers in the 1820s could not have anticipated for a waterway built purely for wartime supply logistics.

Ottawa's selection was not universally welcomed at the time; Toronto and Quebec City in particular had lobbied hard for the honor, and some contemporary newspaper editorials mocked the choice of what was still a rough lumber town, dubbing it derisively a 'sub-Arctic lumber village' unsuited to house a national government — a reputation the city spent decades living down as it built out the institutions and architecture befitting a capital.

The National Capital Commission, established in 1959, has overseen decades of deliberate urban planning to reinforce Ottawa's identity as a green, ceremonial capital, including the Greenbelt encircling the urban core and the annual Canadian Tulip Festival, which traces its origins to a gift of tulip bulbs from the exiled Dutch royal family in gratitude for Canada's role sheltering Princess Juliana and hosting the Dutch government during the Second World War, and for the Canadian troops who helped liberate the Netherlands in 1945.