Edinburgh

The city's name goes back to Din Eidyn, the hillfort of Eidyn, thought to have stood on Castle Rock. Its siege by the Northumbrian Angles in 638 began three centuries of Germanic influence in the south-east, laying the ground for the Scots language, before the town passed to the Scottish kingdom in the 10th century. King David I founded the royal burgh in the early 12th century, and the town grew along the ridge from the castle down to the abbey of Holyrood.

Hemmed in on its ridge, Edinburgh grew upwards: as the population rose, houses along the Royal Mile and the Cowgate were built ever higher, and the tenements and closes became badly overcrowded. The town council founded the university in 1582. After the union of 1707 moved the parliament to London, in the later 18th century the planned New Town was laid out across the valley, while David Hume and others made it a centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. Between 1751 and 1831 the population nearly tripled.

In the 20th century slum clearance moved many Old Town families to new estates on the edges, and Leith, the port, was merged into the city in 1920. The first festivals in 1947 made Edinburgh an international arts city, and in 1999 a Scottish Parliament met here again for the first time since 1707, moving into its building at Holyrood in 2004. In July 2026 the city became the first in Scotland to charge visitors a levy on their stays.

Edinburgh's identity rests on its two towns — the dark stone of the medieval ridge facing the ordered Georgian streets across the gardens — and on its festivals. The International Festival and the Fringe, both founded in 1947, are joined in August by the Military Tattoo and the Book Festival; in 2025 the Fringe alone staged 3,893 shows across 301 venues. Hogmanay brings another huge crowd at New Year, and the Beltane Fire Festival lights up Calton Hill at the end of April.

It is also a literary city, the setting for Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, set in Leith, and Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels, and Walter Scott's monument dominates Princes Street. Folk music is played in pubs across the Old Town and Leith, and the Usher Hall and the Playhouse host concerts and touring shows.

Football divides the city between Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian, the oldest city rivals in Scotland, while Murrayfield fills for Scotland's rugby internationals. Leith, with its own port history, still keeps something of an identity separate from the rest of the city.

The City of Edinburgh council area had an estimated population of about 530,000 in 2024, including outlying towns and villages. It has a young population, with a high share of people in their twenties and thirties drawn by four universities, and people of Chinese and Indian descent form its largest Asian communities.

The economy is one of the strongest of any British city, built on government, finance, law, universities and tourism; in 2023 its output per head passed London's for the first time. The same year the city drew about 5.3 million visits, making it the second most-visited place in Britain.

Most residents live in flats: tenements and blocks of flats have long housed more than half the population, from the Victorian streets of Marchmont and Leith to post-war estates on the edges of the city such as Craigmillar and Pilton. Daily life follows a quiet professional rhythm for most of the year and changes completely in August, when the festivals fill the centre.

The national dish is haggis — sheep's heart, liver and lungs minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices and salt, mixed with stock and traditionally cooked in the animal's stomach — served with neeps and tatties, mashed swede and potatoes, and eaten as the main course of Burns suppers, held on or near 25 January.

Edinburgh's own chip-shop habit sets it apart from the rest of Scotland. In and around the city the usual condiment is "salt and sauce", the sauce being brown sauce mixed with water or malt vinegar, rather than salt and vinegar. A "fish supper" is the Scottish name for fish with chips, and Scotch pies are sold at football grounds.

For eating out, Leith is the city's main restaurant quarter, with seafood places and bistros along the Shore, while the New Town's streets, Stockbridge and the Grassmarket hold pubs, cafés and restaurants of every kind. Scotch whisky is explained at the Scotch Whisky Experience at the top of the Royal Mile and served in many of the city's pubs.