Portland

Before American settlement the lower Willamette and Columbia valleys were among the most densely populated parts of the Pacific coast, home to the Multnomah and Clackamas bands of the Chinook people, whom Lewis and Clark recorded in 1805. In the 1840s settlers arriving on the Oregon Trail began clearing a site on the Willamette between Oregon City and Fort Vancouver, at first called Stumptown or The Clearing for its felled trees. Its two owners, Asa Lovejoy of Boston and Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine, each wanted to name it after his home town; Pettygrove won a best-of-three coin toss. The city was incorporated in 1851 with some 800 inhabitants, a sawmill and a newspaper, the Weekly Oregonian.

As the port for the Willamette Valley's farms and the region's timber, it grew to more than 46,000 people by 1890, despite a fire that destroyed twenty downtown blocks in 1873. The Rose Society was founded in 1889, and the push to become the City of Roses came with the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. The population tripled between 1900 and 1930.

The Second World War brought shipyards and tens of thousands of workers, greatly enlarging the city's small Black community, while up to 3,676 people of Japanese descent were sent from an assembly centre in Portland to internment camps. The Vanport flood of 1948 destroyed the wartime housing town and displaced many Black families. In the late 20th century the city became known for planning and public transport, and it grew by more than 90,000 people between 2000 and 2014. Daily protests after the murder of George Floyd lasted from May 2020 into 2021. In 2025 a new mayor–council government took office, with councillors elected from four districts.

Portland has many nicknames — the City of Roses, Bridgetown for the bridges over the Willamette, Stumptown, Rip City — and a reputation, captured by the slogan Keep Portland Weird and the television comedy Portlandia, for eccentricity, independent businesses and left-leaning politics. The annual Rose Festival in June is the main civic celebration, and the World Naked Bike Ride, held every June since 2004, has been described by a judge as a well-established local tradition.

The arts are lively for a city of its size, with a strong music and performing arts scene, independent cinemas and galleries clustered in the Pearl District and on Alberta Street. Books matter here: the city's large independent bookshop draws crowds to a building covering a whole block. Sport has a devoted following — the Trail Blazers of the NBA, the Timbers and Thorns in soccer, and the Portland Fire in the WNBA — and the Timbers' MLS Cup win in 2015 was the city's first men's professional title since the Blazers' championship of 1977.

Communities are more mixed than the city's mostly white image suggests. Vietnamese Americans are the largest Asian group, there is a historic Roma population, and a second Chinatown has grown along SE 82nd Avenue. The Portland area has long had a large LGBT community. Residents are informal, outdoor-minded and loyal to their side of the river, and the rivalry between east and west siders is mostly good-humoured.

Portland had 652,503 people at the 2020 census, and almost half of all Oregonians live in its metropolitan area, which reaches across the Columbia into Washington. The city sits about 60 miles inland from the Pacific, split by the Willamette into east and west and by Burnside Street into north and south, with addresses that start with their quadrant.

The economy mixes healthcare, the port, manufacturing and the sportswear and technology firms of the western suburbs with local companies such as the bookshop and the grocery chain New Seasons. Brewing is an industry in its own right. Many people commute by MAX, bus or bicycle, though the car still dominates: in 2024 about 7 per cent of commutes were by public transport and 3 per cent by bike.

The city's main problems are homelessness, which residents ranked as the city's top challenge in a 2019 city survey, and property crime, which remains among the highest in the country even as violent crime fell sharply in 2025. Housing costs have risen steeply. Life still revolves around the outdoors: the rainy months are spent in cafés and brewpubs, and in the dry summer people head for the rivers, the gorge, Mount Hood and the coast at weekends.

Food carts are the city's signature. Around a thousand of them were trading in 2023, and about 500 in some 25 pods in 2025, gathered on vacant lots, where a single block might offer cooking from several countries side by side — the cheapest good meals in town. Voodoo Doughnut, founded in Old Town in 2003, is known for unusual creations such as the bacon maple bar.

Portland is also one of the country's great beer cities, with dozens of breweries inside the city limits and many more in the metro area; festivals celebrate beer through the year, from the Oregon Brewers Festival on the waterfront to the Holiday Ale Festival in December. Coffee is just as much a local passion, with many independent coffee shops, and Oregon wine fills out the bar lists.

The surrounding farmland shapes restaurant menus: Oregon hazelnuts, marionberries, Hood River pears, Pacific salmon, shellfish and wild mushrooms. Immigrant communities add much of the rest, above all the Vietnamese restaurants and the Chinese supermarkets, noodle houses and dim sum halls of the Jade District on SE 82nd Avenue. The downtown farmers' market and the Saturday Market's food stalls show off the region's produce.