Canada's unexpectedly delightful capital — where the Rideau Canal becomes the world's largest naturally refrigerated skating rink every winter, Parliament Hill's Gothic Revival towers overlook the Ottawa River at the provincial border between Ontario and Québec, and the National Gallery of Canada holds one of the best collections of Indigenous art on earth
Ottawa (1.0 million; metro 1.4 million) is the capital of Canada and a genuinely underrated travel destination — a bilingual city (English and French) where the federal government's museums (the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of History across the river in Gatineau QC, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Canadian War Museum) are all excellent and most are free or subsidised. The Rideau Canal (202 kilometres long from Ottawa to Kingston, Ontario, UNESCO World Heritage Site 2007) was built between 1826–1832 as a military supply route after the War of 1812 — in winter, the 7.8-ki…
Ottawa sits at the confluence of the Ottawa, Rideau, and Gatineau rivers on territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. The city was founded in 1826 as Bytown, named for Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers who directed construction of the Rideau Canal (1826–1832) — an extraordinary engineering achievement built by hand largely using Irish immigrant labour, with the canal's stone locks and dams surviving intact as the oldest continuously operated canal system in North America. Queen Victoria selected Ottawa as Canada's permanent capital in 1857 (over the competing claims of Toronto, Queb…