Ottawa

The Algonquin Anishinaabe travelled and traded along the Ottawa River for thousands of years, and the river — and later the city — takes its name from the Algonquin word adawe, "to trade". Samuel de Champlain described the waterfalls and the Algonquin people here in the early 17th century. The first settler town, founded by the New Englander Philemon Wright in 1800, was on the north shore at Hull, and it pioneered the Ottawa Valley timber trade. After the War of 1812 the British army decided to build the Rideau Canal as a safe military route to Kingston; a town laid out in 1826 was named Bytown in 1827 after the engineer in charge, Colonel John By, and the canal opened in 1832.

Bytown was a rough lumber town, troubled by the Shiners' War between Irish labourers and French settlers from 1835 to 1845. It became the city of Ottawa in 1855, and Queen Victoria chose it as capital of the Province of Canada, effective at the end of 1857 — a site acceptable to both Upper and Lower Canada and far from the American border. The Gothic Revival Parliament buildings went up between 1859 and 1866, and Ottawa became the national capital at Confederation in 1867.

Fire shaped the city: in 1900 a blaze destroyed much of Hull and the lumber yards, and in 1916 the Centre Block of Parliament burned, to be rebuilt with the Peace Tower by 1927. The Second World War tripled the public service, Jacques Gréber's 1950 plan transformed the city's industrial appearance, and from the 1980s the city boomed as "Silicon Valley North". Ottawa was amalgamated with its suburbs in 2001, and in 2022 the Freedom Convoy, a movement protesting COVID-19 restrictions, drew large numbers of protesters to the capital.

As the capital, Ottawa holds many of the country's national institutions — the National Gallery, the National Arts Centre, the war, nature and aviation museums, and, across the river, the Canadian Museum of History — and Parliament Hill is the stage for national moments, above all Canada Day on 1 July. The ByWard Market, Parliament Hill, Chinatown and the Golden Triangle have long been the focal points of its cultural life.

Ottawa sits on the language border. Lower Town was historically French, Irish and Catholic and Upper Town English and Protestant; today about an eighth of residents have French as their mother tongue, more than a third speak both official languages, and the city has conducted its business in both since 2002. Vanier, once a separate city, is a historically francophone, working-class district, and Gatineau across the river is mostly French-speaking. Ottawa stands on unceded Algonquin land, the subject of a land claim since the 1990s.

The city embraces its winters. Winterlude, run by the federal government since 1979, brings ice sculptures, a snow playground and skating to the capital each February. In May the Canadian Tulip Festival commemorates the Netherlands' gratitude for Canada's part in its liberation with more than a million blooms.

Ottawa had about 1,017,000 people at the 2021 census, the fourth-largest city in Canada, and the Ottawa–Gatineau metropolitan area about 1.5 million. It has the highest proportion of university-educated residents of any Canadian city.

The federal government is the dominant employer, with many departments' headquarters in Centretown, Tunney's Pasture and across the river in Hull. After working largely from home during the pandemic, federal employees returned to the office two days a week from 2022, rising to four in 2026, a change that matters greatly for downtown businesses. Technology is the other pillar: Nortel employed thousands from the 1980s, and many tech companies, including Mitel, are based in Kanata in the west.

Since amalgamation the city has stretched from dense older neighbourhoods such as Centretown, Sandy Hill and Hintonburg to suburbs such as Kanata, Orléans and Nepean and a large rural hinterland. Commuting by OC Transpo buses and the O-Train, or by car across the bridges to Gatineau, frames the working day. Residents make heavy use of the city's parks, bike paths and cross-country ski trails, and summers are spent on the river and canal.

Ottawa's most talked-about dish is shawarma — meat sliced from a slowly turning vertical spit and served in a wrap or on a plate. The city has more shawarma restaurants than anywhere else in Canada, and in 2024 the city council unanimously declared Ottawa the "Shawarma Capital of Canada". Some food writers also link Ottawa-style pizza to the city's Lebanese pizza tradition.

BeaverTails, fried dough pastries hand-stretched into the shape of a beaver's tail and covered in toppings, were first made in the Ottawa Valley in the 1970s, and the chain opened its first permanent store in the city in 1980; a stand in the ByWard Market is famous enough that Barack Obama stopped there in 2009. With its French-Canadian roots, Ottawa serves poutine — fries with cheese curds and gravy — throughout the city.

The ByWard Market is the classic place to eat and shop, with produce and flower stalls in the warmer months, bakeries and a dense mix of restaurants and bars. Preston Street's Little Italy, Chinatown on Somerset Street and the local strips of the Glebe, Hintonburg and Westboro offer the rest of the city's range.