St. John's

The city's name has long been tied to the belief that John Cabot sailed into the harbour on the feast of St John the Baptist in 1497, though this is most likely a legend that came with British settlement. The harbour appears as São João on a Portuguese map of 1519, and St. John's is one of the oldest cities in North America. In August 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed the area for England under a charter from Elizabeth I, but no permanent settlement followed at once. For generations the harbour filled each summer with migratory fishermen, and from 1680 fishing ships, mostly from South Devon, set up fishing rooms on its shores.

Its position made it worth fighting over. Batteries were built to command the Narrows, the only entrance to the harbour, and Signal Hill saw the final battle of the Seven Years' War in North America in 1762; Fort Amherst and Fort Waldegrave followed in the late 1700s. On Signal Hill in December 1901 Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless transmission.

Fire shaped the city as much as war. Major fires in 1816, 1817, 1819, 1846 and 1892 each destroyed a large part of it; the Great Fire of 1892, which began on Carter's Hill, burned most of the downtown core, and most of today's wooden houses date from the rebuilding. During the Second World War the harbour became a base, with Canadian guns at Cape Spear. After a decade of high unemployment and falling population, the Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose offshore oil fields brought a boom that drove growth and new building.

St. John's is the cultural centre of the province. The Rooms gathers the provincial museum, art gallery and archives in one building above downtown, the Arts and Culture Centre has a 1,000-seat theatre, and smaller stages such as the LSPU Hall host local theatre. Memorial University's School of Music has its own ensembles, and the Kittiwake Dance Theatre, founded in 1987, is one of the province's leading dance companies.

Music fills the pubs. George Street, two blocks of nothing but bars, pubs and restaurants, stays busy until the early hours and holds a six-night festival in early August and a Mardi Gras in October, while the pubs of Water Street are quieter. The Royal St. John's Regatta, with races documented since 1816, is the oldest annual sporting event in North America; the first Wednesday of August is a civic holiday, but only if the weather and wind allow the rowing.

Local identity is strong. The city's painted wooden row houses, which gave downtown the nickname Jelly Bean Row, have become its emblem, and the speech, humour and hospitality of Newfoundlanders are a point of pride. Ice hockey returned to the top junior level in 2025, when the relocated Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League team, renamed the Newfoundland Regiment in honour of the province's military history, began playing in the city.

About 110,000 people lived in the city at the 2021 census, and the metropolitan area was estimated at about 239,000 in January 2025, making it the second-largest in Atlantic Canada after Halifax. Immigrants made up about 7 per cent of the city's people in 2021, the largest groups coming from the United Kingdom, the Philippines, the United States, India and Syria.

As the provincial capital, the city is home to the House of Assembly in the Confederation Building and to many government offices. Memorial University of Newfoundland, the largest university in Atlantic Canada, has its main campus here, along with its Marine Institute, and the offshore oil industry — Hibernia, Terra Nova, White Rose and Hebron, which began production in 2017 — supports engineering, supply and shipping work in and around the harbour.

Most people live beyond the old downtown, in suburbs reached by car, with Metrobus routes linking the university, the hospitals, the Avalon Mall and the centre. Weather sets the rhythm of the year: long, snowy winters with storms that can shut the city — a January 2020 snowstorm brought a state of emergency — and short summers spent outdoors on the trails, on the water and on the pedestrianised stretch of Water Street.

The everyday food of St. John's is fish and chips, made with cod and argued over by locals, who have their own favourite fish-and-chip shops. Chips, dressing and gravy — fries topped with bread stuffing and thick gravy — is the late-night order, and cod cheeks are a local favourite.

Older dishes come from the salt-fish economy. Fish and brewis combines salt cod with hard bread softened in water, often topped with scrunchions, small pieces of fried pork fat. Toutons, fried bread dough, are eaten with molasses, and Jiggs dinner — salt beef boiled with cabbage, potatoes, carrot and turnip — is the traditional Sunday meal. Wild berries such as bakeapples, the local name for cloudberries, and partridgeberries go into jams and desserts.

Duckworth Street has many of downtown's restaurants, and the pubs of George Street and Water Street serve pub food alongside beer. Quidi Vidi's brewery is known for a lager made with water from icebergs, and screech, a Jamaican rum bottled in the province, is the drink of the screech-in ceremony for visitors.