Long before any European sighted its coasts, the territory of present-day Canada was home to an extraordinary diversity of Indigenous peoples who had been here, according to the archaeological evidence, for more than fifteen thousand years. They were not a uniform mass but dozens of nations with radically different languages, economies and social organizations, adapted to environments ranging from temperate forest to Arctic tundra.
In the eastern forests lived the Algonquian-speaking nations —Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Innu, Mi'kmaq, Cree— and the Iroquoian-speaking confederacies: the Haudenosaunee (the Confederacy of the Five Nations) and the Huron-Wendat, farmers of corn, beans and squash —the 'three sisters'— who lived in fortified villages and practiced a sophisticated diplomacy. On the immense prairies of the center, the Blackfoot, Plains Cree, Assiniboine and other peoples organized their entire lives around the bison hunt, which gave them food, clothing, shelter and tools.
On the Pacific coast, the abundance of salmon and of the sea allowed the flourishing of what were perhaps the richest and most hierarchical societies in pre-Columbian America north of Mexico: the Haida, Coast Salish, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Tsimshian, famous for their monumental totem poles, their cedar canoes, their communal houses and their potlatch ceremonies. And in the vast Arctic, the Inuit and their predecessors —the Dorset and Thule cultures— mastered one of the most extreme environments on the planet thanks to the igloo, the kayak, the dog sled and a minute knowledge of the ice and the sea.
The first known encounter between Europe and North America did not happen with Christopher Columbus, but five centuries earlier and on Canadian soil. Around the year 1000, Norse sailors from the Viking colony of Greenland —according to the Icelandic sagas, Leif Erikson's expedition— reached the coast of Newfoundland and raised a small settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, at its northern tip. There they built sod houses, forged iron and repaired ships, in what was probably a base for exploring the region they called Vinland.
For a long time that was legend, until in the 1960s the Norwegian archaeologists Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated the site and confirmed its Viking origin. In 2021, a study published in the journal Nature pinned down the date of the occupation with astonishing precision: thanks to a solar storm that left a datable mark in the tree rings, it was determined that the trees were felled with metal tools in exactly the year 1021. L'Anse aux Meadows is today a World Heritage Site and the only confirmed Viking settlement on the continent.
Sustained contact, however, would still take almost five hundred years. In 1497, the navigator John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), in the service of England, touched the shores of the North Atlantic and spread word of a sea so full of cod that you only had to lower a basket to fill it. The fishery drew English, French, Portuguese and Basque fleets, and opened the door to the era of European colonization of Canada.
The French venture began in 1534, when the Saint-Malo sailor Jacques Cartier planted a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and took possession of the territory in the name of King Francis I. On his second voyage, in 1535, he sailed up the great St. Lawrence River as far as the Iroquoian villages of Stadacona (the future Quebec City) and Hochelaga (the future Montreal), opening the route that would become the colony's backbone. But the first attempts to settle failed against winter and scurvy.
The true founder was Samuel de Champlain, geographer, cartographer and tireless explorer. On July 3, 1608 he established a 'habitation' —a fur trading fort— at the point where the St. Lawrence narrows, and so founded Quebec City, the first permanent European settlement in Canada and the capital of New France. Champlain understood that the colony's survival depended on alliances with the Indigenous peoples: he allied himself with the Algonquin, the Innu (Montagnais) and the Huron to reach the furs of the interior.
That alliance had a price. In 1609, Champlain went along with an allied war party against the Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederacy, sealing a confrontation that would last almost a century. The whole economy of New France turned on the beaver, whose pelt was prized in Europe for making felt hats. The legendary coureurs des bois and voyageurs pushed by canoe through the Great Lakes and into the heart of the continent, weaving a trade network that defined the geography of half of Canada.
In 1663, Louis XIV made New France a royal province under his direct authority and sent settlers, soldiers and the 'filles du roi' to populate it. Montreal, founded in 1642 as a mission, became the great center of the fur trade. But the colony grew slowly: by 1750 it had barely some 60,000 inhabitants against the million and a half of the British Thirteen Colonies that hemmed it in from the south. That demographic imbalance would seal its fate.
The rivalry between France and England for control of North America erupted in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The decisive moment came on September 13, 1759, at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, at the gates of Quebec City: in barely half an hour, the British troops of General James Wolfe defeated the French troops of the Marquis de Montcalm. Both generals died of their wounds. Quebec capitulated, Montreal fell the following year and, with the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France ceded to Great Britain virtually all of its possessions in Canada.
The British found themselves governing tens of thousands of French, Catholic, French-speaking subjects whom they could not and did not want to assimilate. The response was pragmatic: the Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteed French Canadians freedom of Catholic worship, the use of their language and the preservation of French civil law. That concession, so resented by the neighboring Thirteen Colonies, laid the foundations of the bicultural character that defines Canada to this day.
The American Revolution (1775-1783) was a turning point for British Canada. After the independence of the United States, between forty and fifty thousand colonists loyal to the crown —the United Empire Loyalists— fled north in search of refuge. They settled in Nova Scotia, in the Saint John River valley (where they drove the creation of New Brunswick in 1784) and, above all, north of the Great Lakes, in what would become Ontario. Those English-speaking, Protestant refugees changed the country's demographic and cultural balance.
To accommodate them, the Constitutional Act of 1791 split the province of Quebec in two: Upper Canada (today's southern Ontario, mostly English) and Lower Canada (today's southern Quebec, mostly French), each with its own assembly. Coexistence, however, was tense. Shortly afterward, in the War of 1812, Canada repelled several American invasions, a founding episode for its identity in the face of its southern neighbor.
Discontent with the colonial government —dominated by cliques of notables such as the 'Family Compact'— erupted in the rebellions of 1837-1838, in both Upper and Lower Canada, led by William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau. The revolts were crushed, but they forced London to send Lord Durham, whose famous report recommended uniting the two colonies and granting them 'responsible government', that is, an executive answerable to the parliamentary majority. The Act of Union of 1840 merged the two Canadas into a single province, though friction between anglophones and francophones soon made it ungovernable.
By the middle of the 19th century, several forces pushed the British colonies of North America toward union: the political deadlock of the United Province of Canada, fear of the expansion of a United States just out of its Civil War, the need to finance railways and the British wish to cut the cost of defending its colonies. The solution was a novel one: instead of a revolution, a federation negotiated around a table.
The process began at the Charlottetown Conference, on Prince Edward Island, in September 1864, and continued at the Quebec Conference that same year and the London Conference of 1866. Out of those meetings came the British North America Act, passed by the British Parliament and given royal assent by Queen Victoria on March 29, 1867. The law took effect on July 1, 1867: the Dominion of Canada was born, with four founding provinces —Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Its first prime minister was the Scottish-Canadian conservative Sir John A. Macdonald, the dominant political figure of the new nation and one of the thirty-six 'Fathers of Confederation', alongside George-Étienne Cartier —key to securing Quebec's rights— and George Brown. The new country was born as a constitutional monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy, with the British crown as head of state. That July 1 is celebrated today as Canada Day, the country's national holiday.
The young Dominion expanded at dizzying speed. In 1870 it bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company, an immense domain covering almost half the continent. In that vast northwest lived the Métis, a mixed people of French-Indigenous root with a language and culture of their own, who rose up under the leadership of Louis Riel when they saw their lands threatened. Their resistance on the Red River forced Ottawa to negotiate: in 1870 the province of Manitoba was born, the fifth of Confederation. The following year, in 1871, British Columbia joined on the condition that Canada build a transcontinental railway; in 1873 Prince Edward Island did the same.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was the country's national epic. Thousands of laborers —among them some 15,000 Chinese workers who endured the most dangerous conditions and of whom hundreds died— laid the track across the prairies and the Rocky Mountains. On November 7, 1885, at Craigellachie (British Columbia), the financier Donald Smith drove the 'last spike' and at last joined the country from ocean to ocean. That same year, the government imposed a discriminatory 'head tax' on Chinese immigrants, one of the dark pages of the country's construction.
The railway had a tragic side. In 1885, a second Métis and First Nations insurrection —the North-West Rebellion— was put down by troops carried in by train, and Louis Riel was hanged for treason, becoming a symbol of the gulf between the anglophone east and the west, and of the marginalization of Indigenous and Métis peoples. With the railway open, millions of immigrants —British, Ukrainian, German, Scandinavian— settled the wheat prairies, and in 1905 the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were born.
Taking part in the two world wars was decisive for Canada's national coming of age. In the First World War, the country mobilized more than 600,000 men out of a population of barely eight million. The symbolic moment was the Battle of Vimy Ridge, at Easter 1917, when the four divisions of the Canadian Corps, fighting together for the first time, took a ridge that the British and the French had failed to capture. It cost more than 3,500 dead, but it is remembered as the moment when Canada 'became a nation'.
Political autonomy came in parallel. The Statute of Westminster, passed in 1931, recognized full legislative sovereignty for Canada and the other British dominions, foreign policy included. In the Second World War, Canada again made an enormous military, naval and industrial effort: on June 6, 1944, some 14,000 Canadian soldiers landed on Juno Beach, one of the five D-Day beaches in Normandy.
Out of the postwar years came a prosperous middle power turned toward the world: co-founder of the UN and of NATO, and a pioneer of peacekeeping thanks to Lester B. Pearson, who devised the first United Nations peacekeeping force during the Suez crisis and received the Nobel Peace Prize for it in 1957, before becoming prime minister. Under his government, in 1965 Canada adopted the red maple leaf flag, the symbol of an identity by then fully its own and detached from British imperial emblems.
The second half of the 20th century was dominated, on the domestic front, by the Quebec question. For almost a century, Quebec society had been traditional, rural and controlled by the Catholic Church. Everything changed with the Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille) that opened after the provincial election of 1960: in a few years the state modernized education, nationalized energy (Hydro-Québec), built a welfare state and pushed the Church out of the center of public life. Out of that awakening came a vigorous secular nationalism.
Its main political expression was the Parti Québécois, founded in 1968 by René Lévesque out of his sovereignty-association movement. In provincial power from 1976, the PQ called the first independence referendum on May 20, 1980: the 'no' won with 60%. In 1982, federal prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau managed to 'patriate' the Constitution —until then amendable only by the British Parliament— and added the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but Quebec never signed that agreement.
The attempts at reconciliation by constitutional means —the Meech Lake (1987) and Charlottetown (1992) accords, which sought to recognize Quebec as a 'distinct society'— failed and revived sovereignist feeling. The second referendum, on October 30, 1995, had a record turnout of 93.5% and a cliffhanger ending: the 'no' won by barely 54,288 votes, 50.58%. Although the independence movement later lost strength, Quebec still asserts its singularity as the great French-speaking society of the Americas.
In 1971, under Pierre Trudeau, Canada became the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as official state policy, later enshrined in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. Since then the country has become one of the great migration destinations on the planet: today around a quarter of its population was born abroad, and cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal rank among the most diverse in the world, with huge Asian, Latin American, Caribbean and African communities.
That story of openness coexists with a historical debt the country only began to settle in the 21st century. For more than a century, some 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were torn from their families and confined in a residential school system, funded by the government and run by the churches, whose declared aim was forced assimilation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which worked between 2008 and 2015, heard thousands of survivors, called what had happened 'cultural genocide' and documented more than four thousand deaths of children in those institutions, the last of which closed in 1997.
In 2021, the discovery of hundreds of possible unmarked graves near former residential schools —beginning with the 215 detected beside the Kamloops school, in British Columbia— shook the country and accelerated a process of recognition that is still open. At the same time, Nunavut had been created in 1999, a territory governed by its Inuit majority, and Indigenous nations made headway on self-government agreements and land claims. In the 21st century, a Canada that legalized same-sex marriage (2005) and recreational cannabis (2018) goes on negotiating the balance between its many identities and its own history.
The 13 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
For thousands of years the prairies of Alberta were the domain of bison-hunting peoples: the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai and Piikani), the Plains Cree, the Tsuu T'ina (Sarcee) and the Assiniboine. They followed the herds across the plain and, before the arrival of the horse, drove them over cliffs at 'buffalo jumps' such as Head-Smashed-In, used for almost six thousand years and declared a World Heritage Site in 1981. The arrival of the horse from the south, in the 18th century, completely transformed their culture and their mobility.
The territory formed part of Rupert's Land, the enormous fur-trading domain of the Hudson's Bay Company, until Canada bought it in 1870. To impose order and put a stop to the illegal whisky trade run by American traders, the North-West Mounted Police —the future Mounties— arrived in 1874 and founded Fort Macleod and Fort Calgary.
The arrival of the railway in the 1880s opened the prairies to rapid settlement. Alberta filled with ranchers and with immigrants —British, Ukrainian, German, Scandinavian, American— who plowed the prairie for wheat and raised cattle on the ranches of the south. From that ranching culture Calgary inherited its famous rodeo, the Calgary Stampede, first held in 1912 and today one of the largest in the world. In 1905, Alberta was created as a province along with Saskatchewan, with Edmonton as its capital.
For decades the economy was essentially agricultural and pastoral, marked by the wheat cycles and by the harshness of the Great Depression, which struck the drought-stricken prairies with particular cruelty. That period fed political movements of the west's own making, such as Social Credit, which governed the province for much of the 20th century.
Everything changed on February 13, 1947, when the Leduc No. 1 well, near Edmonton, came in and revealed the province's enormous conventional reserves. The discovery set off a boom that turned Alberta into the energy capital of Canada: oil and gas displaced agriculture as the main industry and made the province one of the richest in the country.
From 1967 the exploitation of the oil sands of the north also began, around Fort McMurray, among the largest crude reserves in the world; by 2002 their output surpassed that of conventional oil for the first time. Calgary, home of the big oil companies, and Edmonton, the capital, grew as the two great rival cities of a prosperous, young province with a strong western identity.
Alberta holds some of the most famous landscapes in Canada. In 1885, the discovery of hot springs in the Rockies gave rise to Banff, the country's first national park —and the third in the world— today a World Heritage Site. Its jewels draw millions of visitors: Lake Louise, turquoise at the foot of a glacier; Moraine Lake, in the Valley of the Ten Peaks; and the adjoining Jasper National Park, with the impressive Columbia Icefield crossed by the Icefields Parkway.
In the far southwest, Waterton Lakes National Park joins prairie and mountain in a landscape all its own, twinned with the American Glacier in the world's first international peace park. These parks, together with Yoho and Kootenay in neighboring British Columbia, make up the Canadian Rockies ensemble recognized by UNESCO.
Toward the east, the prairie suddenly opens into the spectacular badlands of the Red Deer River valley, around Drumheller. This eroded landscape of barren ground, canyons and 'hoodoos' holds one of the richest dinosaur fossil beds on the planet: at Dinosaur Provincial Park, a World Heritage Site, and at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, skeletons of dozens of Cretaceous species have been found and are on display.
That combination —glacier-carved mountains to the west, wheat and cattle prairies in the center, paleontological badlands to the east and oil fields to the north— makes Alberta one of the provinces of greatest geographic contrast in Canada, and a destination that brings together grand nature, cowboy culture and science.
The coast of British Columbia was home to some of the richest and most densely populated Indigenous cultures in pre-Columbian America north of Mexico. The Haida of the Haida Gwaii islands, the Coast Salish, the Kwakwaka'wakw, the Nuu-chah-nulth and the Tsimshian developed complex, opulent societies thanks to the abundance of salmon and of the sea. Famous for their totem poles, their communal cedar houses, their monumental canoes and their potlatch ceremonies, many of these nations never signed treaties and today claim their ancestral territories in the courts.
The first Europeans arrived by sea in the late 18th century, drawn by sea otter pelts: the Spaniard Juan Pérez in 1774, and then the British James Cook and George Vancouver, who charted the coast in painstaking detail in the 1790s. The region was the object of the Spanish-British Nootka dispute before it settled into the British orbit.
The modern history of British Columbia began abruptly with the Fraser River gold rush of 1858, when some 30,000 prospectors —many of them arriving from California— made their way up the river. Fear of an American annexation led Great Britain to proclaim that same year the mainland colony of British Columbia, under Governor James Douglas, later joined with that of Vancouver Island. Victoria, at the southern tip of the island, became the capital.
In 1871, the colony joined Confederation on the condition that Canada build a transcontinental railway within ten years. The arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway at the coast in 1885-1887 gave birth to Vancouver, incorporated as a city in 1886 —the same year a great fire razed it in barely half an hour. Rebuilt at once, it soon overtook Victoria as the province's main city and port, Canada's great gateway to the Pacific and to Asia.
The 20th century consolidated Vancouver as one of the most dynamic and multicultural cities in Canada, with a huge community of Asian origin and a central role in Pacific trade. The 1986 World's Fair (Expo 86), which drew more than 22 million visitors, transformed the city and left behind infrastructure such as the SkyTrain, Canada Place and Science World. In 2010, Vancouver and Whistler hosted the Winter Olympic Games.
The province's history also has its dark pages: the 'head tax' imposed on Chinese immigrants from 1885 and the exclusion that followed, or the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Today, wedged between the ocean and the mountains, Vancouver is famous for its quality of life and its fusion of nature and city.
British Columbia is the most mountainous province in Canada and the one with the greatest biodiversity. In its stretch of the Rockies it shares with Alberta a group of national parks declared World Heritage Sites, among them Yoho —with Emerald Lake and the famous Burgess Shale fossils— and Kootenay, of hot springs and gorges. Whistler, near Vancouver, is one of the great ski resorts in the world and was an Olympic venue in 2010.
On Vancouver Island, Pacific Rim National Park Reserve protects wild beaches and temperate rainforest next to Tofino, a mecca for surfing and whale watching. And inland, the sunny Okanagan Valley, with Kelowna as its capital, is the main wine and fruit-growing region of western Canada, an almost Mediterranean contrast with the rainy coast.
A good part of the coast of British Columbia is covered by the largest temperate rainforest left on the planet, an ecosystem of thousand-year-old cedars and firs that is home to the rare Kermode or 'spirit bear'. The Great Bear Rainforest region, protected after years of negotiation between governments, the forest industry and First Nations, became a world model of conservation agreed with Indigenous peoples.
That Indigenous prominence is one of the keys to the province's present. Since most of its territory was never ceded by treaty, the Haida, Nuu-chah-nulth, Tsilhqot'in and other nations have won in the courts and in politics a growing say over their ancestral lands. The Haida Gwaii archipelago, co-managed with the Haida Nation in the Gwaii Haanas reserve, is the great symbol of that cultural reaffirmation, with its totem poles and ancestral villages facing the Pacific.
Manitoba, at the geographic heart of Canada, was for thousands of years the land of the Cree, Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) and Dakota peoples and, in the far north, of the Inuit. Its network of rivers and lakes —Lake Winnipeg is one of the largest in the world— made it a key artery of the fur trade. The Hudson's Bay Company established posts on the Arctic coast as early as the 17th century, such as York Factory, and the point where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet —The Forks, today in Winnipeg— was for centuries a place of Indigenous gathering and trade.
Out of the union between European traders, above all French and Scottish, and Indigenous women came the Métis people, with a language (Michif), a culture and an economy of their own, tied to the bison hunt and to the transport of furs. The Red River colony, founded in 1812 with Scottish settlers, became the nucleus of that mixed community.
When Canada bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869-1870, the Métis of Red River, fearing they would lose their lands and rights with the arrival of surveyors and settlers, rose up under the leadership of Louis Riel and formed a provisional government. Their resistance forced a negotiation with Ottawa: the Manitoba Act, given royal assent on May 12, 1870, created the fifth province of Confederation, with guarantees —on paper at least— for the French language, Catholicism and Métis lands.
The execution of the Orangeman prisoner Thomas Scott by the provisional government in 1870 unleashed reprisals, and Riel had to go into exile in the United States despite being regarded as the 'father of Manitoba'. He returned to lead the North-West Rebellion of 1885 in Saskatchewan, after which he was tried and hanged, becoming a tragic symbol of the Métis struggle and of the tension between the anglophone east and the west.
With the railway, Winnipeg grew at dizzying speed as a great rail and commercial crossroads, 'the gateway to the west', and in the early 20th century it was one of the most prosperous and cosmopolitan cities in Canada, with strong Ukrainian, Jewish, German and Eastern European immigration. In 1919, the city was the stage of the historic Winnipeg General Strike, one of the founding moments of the Canadian labor movement.
Today Winnipeg, the provincial capital at the geographic midpoint of the country, is a culturally diverse city, home of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights —the only national museum outside the capital region— and of a vibrant francophone cultural scene in the Saint-Boniface neighborhood, a direct legacy of the old Red River.
Few provinces reflect the Canadian melting pot as well as Manitoba. To the Indigenous and Métis base were added waves of immigrants who left an indelible cultural mark: the Ukrainians, whose Orthodox domes and churches dot the prairie; the German-speaking Mennonites who settled the south; the Icelanders of Gimli, beside Lake Winnipeg, who founded the largest Icelandic community outside Iceland; and Jewish, Polish and Filipino communities, among many others.
That diversity coexists with a strong Indigenous presence: Manitoba has one of the highest proportions of First Nations and Métis population in Canada, and Winnipeg is home to the largest urban Indigenous community in the country. French, guaranteed since the founding of the province and alive today in Saint-Boniface, completes an exceptionally varied linguistic and cultural map.
Manitoba combines the wheat prairie of the south with thousands of lakes, the boreal forest and the Arctic tundra of the north, which looks out onto Hudson Bay. Its geography goes from grain to ice in a few hundred kilometers.
Its most astonishing natural destination lies in the far north: Churchill, on the shore of Hudson Bay and reachable only by train or plane, is known as the 'polar bear capital of the world'. Every autumn, hundreds of bears gather there waiting for the bay to freeze so they can go out to hunt seals, and in summer thousands of belugas make their way up the estuary of the Churchill River. It is also one of the best places on the planet to watch the northern lights, one of the world's great spectacles of wildlife and sky.
The territory of New Brunswick was home to the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik) and Passamaquoddy peoples, hunters and fishers of the great rivers and the Atlantic coast. It was part of French Acadia from the early seventeenth century, and its fertile valleys, above all around the Bay of Fundy and the Saint John River, were settled by Acadian families before the British conquest.
The deportation of 1755 struck the Acadians of this region as well, but many managed to hide in the inland forests or to return once the conflict was over. Their descendants rebuilt their communities and today make up a vibrant francophone population, concentrated above all in the north and east of the province, in what is known as l'Acadie.
After the American Revolution, some 14,000 Loyalists faithful to the British Crown took refuge in the region, founding in 1785 the city of Saint John, the first incorporated city in Canada. Their arrival in such numbers overwhelmed the administration of Nova Scotia, on which the territory depended, and in 1784 Britain split off the area and created the colony of New Brunswick, named after the royal house of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
New Brunswick was one of the four founding provinces of Confederation in 1867, and its capital, Fredericton, became an administrative and cultural center. The province's economy rested on timber, shipbuilding and fishing along its great rivers and its long coastline.
The long coexistence of francophone Acadians and anglophone descendants of the Loyalists shapes the identity of New Brunswick. In 1969 the province took a historic step by passing the Official Languages Act and becoming the only officially bilingual province in Canada, with French and English on an equal footing. That status was later enshrined in the Constitution.
Moncton, in the east, stands as the economic heart of the province and a symbol of the Acadian revival: home to the Université de Moncton, the leading francophone institution outside Quebec, and the engine of an Acadian culture that celebrates its identity with its tricolor flag and its national holiday on August 15. Fredericton and Saint John round out the urban map of this province between two languages.
New Brunswick's greatest natural treasure is the Bay of Fundy, which separates it from Nova Scotia and records the highest tides on the planet: the difference between high and low tide is more than 16 meters, and each cycle moves more water than all the rivers of the world combined. That colossal phenomenon carved the famous rock 'flowerpots' of Hopewell Rocks, which can be walked around at low tide and become islets surrounded by water at high tide.
The bay is also a feast for whales, drawn by the richness of its cold waters, and it sustains a unique coastal ecosystem protected in part by Fundy National Park. Rivers such as the Saint John, which runs through Fredericton, and a dense cover of Acadian forest complete the profile of this maritime province, green and turned toward the sea.
More than 80% of New Brunswick is covered in forest, which has made the timber and paper industry a historic pillar of its economy, alongside fishing and, in the north, mining. The great Saint John River, nicknamed the 'Rhine of North America' for its fertile valleys and its landscapes, crosses the province from north to south and stars in the curious phenomenon of the Reversing Falls of Saint John, where the force of the Fundy tide turns the current back on itself.
The ground below holds treasures for science as well: the fossil cliffs of Joggins, in neighboring Nova Scotia, and the deposits of New Brunswick itself document life in the Carboniferous. The province also draws visitors with its warm beaches on the Northumberland Strait —among the mildest waters north of Virginia— and with coastal villages where English and Acadian French live side by side.
The island of Newfoundland and the vast mainland region of Labrador were home to distinct Indigenous peoples: the Beothuk on the island, the Innu and the Inuit in Labrador, and the Mi'kmaq, who arrived later. The tragedy of the Beothuk marks the history of the province: cornered by colonization and disease, they disappeared as a people in 1829 with the death of Shanawdithit, the last known survivor, who died of tuberculosis in St. John's.
At the northern tip of the island lies the first and only confirmed Viking settlement in the Americas: L'Anse aux Meadows, occupied around the year 1021 —a date pinned down precisely by the study of tree rings— and today a World Heritage Site. It is the proof that Europeans reached the continent almost five centuries before Columbus. In 1497, John Cabot came ashore on these coasts and spread the word of a sea teeming with cod.
For centuries, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland were the greatest cod fishery in the world, fought over by English, French, Portuguese and Basque fishermen, who dried their catch on the shore before taking it to Europe. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed the island for Queen Elizabeth I, making it England's first overseas colony. St. John's, its capital, is one of the oldest European cities in North America.
Newfoundland followed a path apart from the rest of Canada. It refused to join Confederation in the nineteenth century and went on to become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. The Great Depression, however, drove it into bankruptcy and forced it to give up self-government in 1934, leaving it under the direct administration of London.
After the Second World War, the future of Newfoundland was decided in two narrow referendums. Driven by Joey Smallwood, who promised the social benefits of the Canadian state —unemployment insurance, pensions, the 'baby bonus'—, the option of union with Canada won in 1948, and on March 31, 1949 Newfoundland and Labrador became the tenth and last province to join Confederation. Smallwood was its first premier, until 1972.
Dependence on cod ended in catastrophe. Overfishing by industrial fleets cut the spawning biomass by more than 90% in three decades, and on July 2, 1992 the federal government declared a total moratorium on the northern cod fishery. It was the largest layoff in Canadian history: some 30,000 people were out of work overnight, and a centuries-old way of life came to an end in hundreds of small fishing villages (outports).
Newfoundland offers some of the most dramatic landscapes in Canada. Gros Morne National Park, a World Heritage Site, protects glacial fjords and the Tablelands, a stretch of ocher rock from the Earth's mantle laid bare by plate tectonics, which made the park a world reference point for geology and the theory of continental drift.
St. John's, the capital, with its colored houses climbing the slopes of the harbor and its lighthouse at Cape Spear —the easternmost point in North America—, is the gateway to the province. Newfoundland culture, with its unmistakable accent of Irish and English roots, its music, its drifting icebergs and its legendary hospitality, is one of the most singular and best-loved in the country.
Often overshadowed by the island, the mainland part of the province —Labrador— is an immense and wild territory almost three times larger than Newfoundland, of tundra, taiga and mountains. It is the ancestral home of the Innu and of the Inuit, the latter organized since 2005 in the self-governing region of Nunatsiavut, the first of its kind for the Inuit within a Canadian province. Torngat Mountains National Park, comanaged with the Inuit communities, protects the highest peaks in mainland eastern Canada.
Labrador also holds one of the largest hydroelectric works in the world, the Churchill Falls generating station, and enormous iron reserves around Labrador City. The coastal route and the Trans-Labrador Highway are slowly opening this last great frontier to the most adventurous travelers, in a landscape where caribou migrate by the thousand and nature keeps an overwhelming scale.
The Northwest Territories, an immense expanse of boreal forest, tundra and great lakes, were and are home to the Dene (Déné) peoples —Chipewyan, Tlicho, Gwich'in, Sahtu and others—, to the northern Métis and, on the Arctic coast, to the Inuvialuit, the western branch of the Inuit. For thousands of years they lived on caribou hunting, fishing in the great lakes and trapping for furs.
For centuries the region formed part of the Hudson's Bay Company's Rupert's Land and was crossed by the explorers of the fur trade. In 1789 the Scot Alexander Mackenzie descended the great river that now bears his name —the longest in Canada— all the way to the Arctic Ocean, searching in vain for a passage to the Pacific.
When Canada acquired the northwestern territories in 1870, it turned them into an enormous administrative district out of which, over time, several provinces and territories were carved. The discovery of gold in the 1930s gave rise to Yellowknife, today the capital, on the shore of Great Slave Lake. And since the 1990s, the discovery of kimberlite has made the Northwest Territories one of the most important diamond-producing regions in the world, with mines such as Ekati and Diavik.
In 1999 the eastern half of the territory split off to form Nunavut, leaving the Northwest Territories with their present shape. Indigenous peoples, who make up the majority of the population, have moved ahead with self-government agreements and land claims —such as that of the Tlicho— that are redrawing political life and administration in the north.
The natural symbol of the territory is Nahanni National Park Reserve, one of the first sites inscribed as a World Heritage Site, in the Mackenzie Mountains. The South Nahanni River winds between deep canyons and plunges over Virginia Falls (Náįlįcho), almost twice as high as Niagara, in a legendary setting reachable only by plane or by canoe.
Yellowknife is also one of the best places on the planet to watch the northern lights, thanks to its clear skies and its position under the auroral oval, which draws travelers from all over the world. Great lakes, untamed rivers, the winter ice road and a wildlife of bears, caribou, wood bison and waterfowl make the Northwest Territories a destination for the adventurous traveler.
The geography of the Northwest Territories is dominated by water. Great Slave Lake, the deepest in North America, and Great Bear Lake, the largest lying entirely within Canada, are among the biggest bodies of fresh water on the planet. Out of them and of countless rivers rises the Mackenzie, the great artery that runs 1,700 kilometers to the Arctic delta and that was, for centuries, the route of the fur trade and of the Dene communities along its banks.
That delta and the coastal lands of the Inuvialuit, around Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk —now connected by road to the rest of Canada—, are a world of tundra, pingos and midnight sun. Wood Buffalo National Park, shared with Alberta and a World Heritage Site, protects the largest free-roaming bison herd in the world and the only natural nesting ground of the whooping crane.
With eleven official languages —nine of them Indigenous, along with English and French—, the Northwest Territories are one of the most linguistically diverse places in Canada. Yellowknife, the capital born of the gold rush of the 1930s, is a small, cosmopolitan hub where miners, civil servants, Dene, Métis and Inuvialuit live side by side.
The territory has become a world stage for northern lights tourism, drawing travelers from Asia and from across the planet to its winter skies. To that are added canoe expeditions on legendary rivers, sport fishing in remote waters and the ice roads that every winter turn frozen rivers and lakes into highways to isolated communities, in one of the last great inhabited frontiers of the Americas.
The Nova Scotia peninsula was for thousands of years the territory of the Mi'kmaq people, skilled fishers, hunters and seafarers of the Atlantic who were among the first to deal with Europeans and who signed with the British Crown the so-called Peace and Friendship Treaties, still in force today. In the early seventeenth century, French settlers founded Acadia here, one of the first European colonies in North America, around Port-Royal (1605).
The Acadians developed a culture of their own and an ingenious system of dikes (aboiteaux) to reclaim from the sea the fertile marshes of the Bay of Fundy. The region was a battleground between France and England for more than a century; with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, peninsular Acadia passed into British hands, although its population remained French and Catholic.
In 1755, on the eve of the final war against France, and frustrated by the Acadians' refusal to swear unconditional allegiance to the British Crown, the British ordered their deportation. Beginning on September 5, 1755, some ten thousand people were driven from their lands, put on ships and scattered across the American colonies, England and France over the course of eight years. Thousands died of disease or hunger on the crossings. Many ended up in Louisiana, where they gave rise to 'Cajun' culture.
That Grand Dérangement is one of the most tragic pages in Canadian history and was seared into Acadian memory, immortalized later in Longfellow's poem 'Evangeline'. The landscape of Grand-Pré, the heart of the Acadian world, is today a World Heritage Site as a place of remembrance of the deportation.
In the void left by the Acadians, Britain encouraged the arrival of Protestant settlers. It founded Halifax in 1749 as a naval and military base, populated the coast with German immigrants —who founded Lunenburg in 1753— and, above all, with thousands of Scots from the Highlands who arrived from the late eighteenth century onward. Their Gaelic language, their music and their Celtic culture survive to this day, especially on Cape Breton Island, and explain the province's Latin name: Nova Scotia, 'New Scotland'.
Loyalists arriving after the American Revolution also settled here, among them many free and enslaved Black people, whose descendants form one of the oldest communities of African descent in Canada. That blend of Mi'kmaq, Acadians, Scots, Germans and Black Canadians defines the plural character of the province.
Nova Scotia was one of the four founding provinces of Confederation in 1867, though not without resistance from those who preferred to stay tied to Britain. Its history is inseparable from the ocean: cod, shipbuilding and maritime trade made it prosperous in the nineteenth century, the 'golden age of sail'. Halifax, its capital and one of the great natural harbors in the world, was the entry point for more than a million immigrants —its Pier 21 is the 'Canadian Ellis Island'— and the scene, in 1917, of the Halifax Explosion, the largest man-made blast before the atomic age, which flattened part of the city and killed some 2,000 people.
Today the province draws visitors with its rugged coast and its lighthouses, such as the iconic one at Peggy's Cove; with Lunenburg, a World Heritage old town and the birthplace of the schooner Bluenose; and with Cape Breton Highlands National Park, crossed by the spectacular Cabot Trail scenic road.
Almost entirely surrounded by the sea —no point in the province is more than 60 kilometers from the coast—, Nova Scotia lives facing the Atlantic. Its jagged shoreline holds hundreds of lighthouses, fishing villages of wooden houses and bays where the prized lobster is caught. The Titanic, which sank in 1912 off its coasts, left Halifax the cemeteries where many of its victims rest.
Cape Breton Island, joined to the mainland by a causeway, is the heart of the province's Celtic culture: here fiddle music of Scottish roots survives, Gaelic is still taught and every autumn the Celtic Colours festival celebrates that legacy while the forests turn red and gold. The Cabot Trail, which winds along the cliffs of the north of the island, is considered one of the most beautiful scenic roads in the world.
The territory of Ontario, organized around four of the five Great Lakes, was for millennia home to First Nations peoples. In the south lived the Iroquoian-speaking nations —the Huron-Wendat, corn farmers who lived in fortified villages, and the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—, while the forests and lakes of the north were the domain of the Algonquian peoples: Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Odawa, Cree and others.
The first Europeans to travel the region, in the early seventeenth century, were the French explorer Étienne Brûlé and the Jesuit missionaries, who founded the mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons. The wars between Hurons and Iroquois over control of the fur trade, fanned by European alliances, devastated the Wendat nation around 1650 and completely reshaped the human map of the region.
Modern Ontario was born of the American Revolution. After the independence of the United States, tens of thousands of Loyalists faithful to the British Crown took refuge north of the Great Lakes. To govern this English-speaking, Protestant population, the Constitutional Act of 1791 created Upper Canada, separate from French Lower Canada, with its capital first at Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and later at York, the future Toronto.
During the War of 1812, Upper Canada was the scene of American invasions repelled with the help of the First Nations and of figures such as the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and General Isaac Brock. Discontent with the governing elite —the 'Family Compact'— led to the rebellion of 1837 headed by William Lyon Mackenzie which, although it failed, hastened the arrival of responsible government.
Ontario was one of the four founding provinces of Confederation in 1867, and Toronto remained the seat of its provincial government. The city of Ottawa, by contrast, had been chosen in 1857 by Queen Victoria as the capital of the United Province of Canada —and later of the country— for its position on the border between the English-speaking and French-speaking worlds and for its relative safety from the United States. There stand today the Parliament buildings, on the hill overlooking the Ottawa River.
Kingston, on the shore of Lake Ontario, had been the first capital of the United Province in 1841 and preserves a remarkable military and university heritage. The Rideau Canal system, completed in 1832 and today a World Heritage Site, links Kingston with Ottawa as a testament to British colonial engineering.
Over the course of the twentieth century, southern Ontario became the country's great industrial, financial and demographic hub. Toronto displaced Montreal as Canada's economic capital and is today the nation's largest city and one of the most multicultural in the world, crowned by the CN Tower. Its stock exchange, its banks and its financial district concentrate the economic heart of Canada.
The so-called 'Golden Horseshoe', the urban arc that wraps around the western end of Lake Ontario, takes in Hamilton —the historic 'steel city'— and the automotive corridor that made the province the country's great manufacturing center. Cities such as London, Windsor and Kitchener-Waterloo complete an industrial and technological fabric that sustains a good part of Canada's GDP.
Ontario's natural symbol is Niagara Falls, one of the most famous water spectacles on the planet and the most visited tourist destination in Canada, on the border with the United States. But the province is also a land of water and forest: the Muskoka region with its 'cottages', the Thousand Islands archipelago on the St. Lawrence River, the Bruce Peninsula on Lake Huron and the vast Algonquin Provincial Park, created in 1893 and considered the birthplace of Canadian canoeing.
To the north, the geography changes completely: the granite of the Canadian Shield and the boreal forest cover an immense, sparsely populated territory that reaches all the way to Hudson Bay. On the cultural front, the prestigious Stratford Festival, devoted to Shakespeare, and the Toronto arts scene make Ontario a cultural center of the first rank.
The island, which the Mi'kmaq called Epekwitk ('resting on the waves'), was for millennia their seasonal fishing and hunting territory. The French colonized it in the eighteenth century under the name Île Saint-Jean, settling it with Acadians, many of them refugees from the deportations on the mainland; the deportation of 1758 struck the island as well, after the fall of the neighboring fortress of Louisbourg.
After the British conquest, the island passed into English hands and was renamed in 1799 in honor of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. Its red sandstone soil, rich in iron oxide, gave it the characteristic color that defines its landscape: green fields on reddish earth, edged by sandy beaches and dunes.
Although it is Canada's smallest province, Prince Edward Island holds a central place in the country's history. In September 1864, in Charlottetown, the delegates of the British North American colonies gathered at the conference that set the process of Confederation in motion. That is why the province takes pride in being the 'Birthplace of Confederation'.
Paradoxically, the island did not join the new country in 1867: wary of losing its autonomy, it waited until July 1, 1873, when a financial crisis tied to the building of its railway pushed it to join as the seventh province, on the promise that Ottawa would take on its debts and guarantee a permanent link with the mainland.
Prince Edward Island is famous the world over as the setting of 'Anne of Green Gables', the novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery published in 1908, which draws legions of admirers —especially from Japan— to the farm that inspired the story and to the village of Cavendish. The red-haired girl became a cultural symbol of Canada.
For more than a century the island depended on the ferry to connect with the mainland, until in 1997 the Confederation Bridge opened, a bridge of nearly 13 kilometers that crosses the Northumberland Strait and is the longest bridge in the world over waters that freeze in winter. Charlottetown, the capital, keeps its Victorian atmosphere and its role as historic seat at the Confederation Centre of the Arts.
The economy of Prince Edward Island lives off the land and the sea. It is celebrated for its potatoes, grown by taking advantage of the red, fertile soil, and for the lobster, mussel and oyster fishery that has made it famous among lovers of seafood. Its bucolic landscapes of farms, lighthouses and church steeples above a blue sea have earned it the nickname 'garden island'.
Prince Edward Island National Park protects a stretch of its dunes, red sand beaches and cliffs along the north coast, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Small, quiet and on a human scale, the island offers the gentlest, most rural face of Canada.
Charlottetown, the capital and the province's only city, preserves the feel of a Victorian town around Province House, where the founding conference of 1864 was held, and around the modern Confederation Centre of the Arts, which every summer stages the Anne of Green Gables musical. It is the island's cultural, administrative and university center.
Beneath the bucolic image a plural history lives on. The Mi'kmaq community maintains its presence in Epekwitk, with reserves such as Lennox Island and Abegweit, and celebrates its culture and its language. The French-speaking Acadian minority, descended from the settlers of the Île Saint-Jean who escaped the deportation or returned, keeps its traditions alive in the Évangéline region, in the west of the island, where French and the Acadian flag still fly.
Quebec is the historic heart of the French presence in America. In 1535, Jacques Cartier had sailed up the St. Lawrence as far as the Iroquoian villages of Stadacona and Hochelaga, but it was Samuel de Champlain who, on July 3, 1608, founded Quebec City at the point where the river narrows —hence its name, from the Algonquin kebec, 'where the river narrows'. It was the first permanent French colony and the capital of New France.
Montreal, founded in 1642 as the mission of Ville-Marie, soon became the great center of the fur trade and the base from which the voyageurs set out to explore the continent. Colonial life revolved around the river, the beaver and the Catholic Church, in a rural, devout society of large families whose language and faith would survive even the British conquest.
The fate of the colony was sealed in 1759, when the battle of the Plains of Abraham, at the gates of Quebec City, handed it to the British; the Treaty of Paris of 1763 confirmed the transfer. Despite the change of sovereign, the French-speaking population kept its language, its religion and its French civil law thanks to the Quebec Act of 1774, a decisive concession that explains why, more than two and a half centuries later, Quebec remains mostly French-speaking.
Set apart as Lower Canada in 1791, the territory lived through the rebellion of 1837 led by the Patriotes of Louis-Joseph Papineau. In 1867, Quebec was one of the four founding provinces of Confederation, with the guarantee that it would keep its language, its faith and its civil code. For nearly a century, Quebec society remained traditional, rural and dominated by the clergy, until the jolt of modernity in the 1960s.
From 1960 on, the Quiet Revolution transformed Quebec at the root: the provincial state modernized education, nationalized energy with Hydro-Québec, built a welfare state and pushed the Church out of the center of public life. From that awakening was born a secular and powerful nationalism. The Parti Québécois, founded in 1968 by René Lévesque, drove two referendums on independence: that of 1980, with 60% for 'no', and that of 1995, in which 'no' won by the narrowest of margins with 50.58% and a turnout of 93.5%.
In 1977, the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) enshrined French as the province's only official language. Today Quebec asserts its singularity within Canada as the great French-speaking society of America. Montreal, cosmopolitan and bilingual, is its cultural metropolis, while Quebec City —the only walled city north of Mexico and a World Heritage Site— embodies the memory of New France.
Quebec's singularity is not only linguistic but cultural. From its French and Catholic stock grew an identity of its own, with its cuisine —poutine, maple syrup, tourtière—, its chanson, its cinema and a festive life that runs from the winter Carnival of Quebec City to the Montreal Jazz Festival, one of the largest in the world. Quebec French, with its accent and its turns of phrase, is a living language distinct from that of France.
The province also maintains a strong bond with the international Francophonie and an immigration policy of its own aimed at preserving the weight of French. That mixture of European roots, attachment to language and North American modernity makes Quebec a unique place: the gateway to French-speaking America.
Quebec's geography is as singular as its history. The majestic St. Lawrence River is its backbone: at Tadoussac, where the Saguenay fjord flows into the river, whales gather —including the giant blue whale— at one of the best watching sites in the world. The Charlevoix region, a biosphere reserve shaped by the impact of an ancient meteorite, and the Gaspé Peninsula, with its maritime culture and Forillon Park, offer landscapes of hills and cliffs above the sea.
North of Montreal, the Laurentian Mountains and the Mont-Tremblant resort are the mecca of skiing and mountain tourism, while Mont-Sainte-Anne, near the capital, rounds out the winter offering. Towards the deep north, the immense territory of Nord-du-Québec and Nunavik is a vast subarctic domain inhabited by Cree and Inuit, proof of the enormous scale of a province that combines European culture, wild nature and four distinct seasons.
For millennia Saskatchewan was the territory of bison-hunting peoples —Plains Cree, Saulteaux (Ojibwe), Assiniboine (Nakota), Dakota and Atsina— whose entire way of life revolved around the immense herds that roamed the prairie. The territory formed part of the Hudson's Bay Company's Rupert's Land and was one of the last great free hunting grounds on the continent.
The arrival of traders, of diseases such as smallpox and of commercial hunting brought about, by around 1880, the near-extermination of the bison and the collapse of the Indigenous way of life. The numbered treaties signed in the 1870s confined the First Nations to reserves in exchange for promises that were often broken, and opened the prairie to European settlement.
In 1885, the discontent of the Métis and the First Nations of the Saskatchewan valley, impoverished and displaced, erupted into the North-West Rebellion, led once again by Louis Riel and the Métis military leader Gabriel Dumont. Put down by troops brought in on the new railway, the revolt ended with Riel's hanging in Regina, an episode that left lasting wounds.
The railway and the promise of cheap land then drew a flood of immigrants —British, Ukrainian, German, Scandinavian, Russian Doukhobors— who broke the prairie with the plough and sowed it with wheat. In 1905, Saskatchewan was created as a province together with Alberta, with Regina as its capital, and became 'Canada's breadbasket', a world leader in wheat production as well as a key source of potash and uranium.
Out of the hard cooperative and communal culture of the prairies came one of Saskatchewan's most important legacies for all of Canada. In 1962, under the government of the social democratic politician Tommy Douglas and his successor Woodrow Lloyd, the province introduced the first public, universal, single-payer health insurance system in North America, despite a 23-day doctors' strike.
The success of the Saskatchewan model meant that, in less than a decade, all of Canada adopted a similar system, the medicare that is today one of the country's hallmarks. Tommy Douglas is remembered as the 'father of medicare' and was voted, in a national poll, the greatest Canadian in history.
Saskatchewan is the province of big skies and horizons without end, where the plain stretches to the edge of the world. Regina, its capital, is home to the barracks and training academy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the celebrated Mounties. Saskatoon, the largest city, spreads along the banks of the South Saskatchewan River and is a university and mining center.
In the far south, against the United States border, Grasslands National Park protects one of the last remnants of North America's native mixed-grass prairie, with prairie dogs, reintroduced bison and one of the largest dark-sky preserves on the continent: with no light pollution, it offers one of the starriest night skies in Canada.
Against the cliché of the flat prairie, Saskatchewan sets some remarkable geographical surprises. In the south rise the Cypress Hills, a wooded massif that escaped the last glaciation and forms the highest point in Canada between the Rockies and Labrador; there, in 1873, the Cypress Hills massacre of the Assiniboine hastened the arrival of the Mounted Police in the west. Further north, the Great Sand Hills form an unexpected desert of active dunes in the middle of the plain.
Indigenous heritage runs through much of the territory. Wanuskewin Heritage Park, near Saskatoon, protects a gathering place of the Plains peoples used for nearly six thousand years and a candidate for World Heritage status, with traces of buffalo jumps, campsites and a medicine wheel. The north of the province, by contrast, is a world of boreal forest, rivers and tens of thousands of lakes, the domain of Cree and Dene communities.
The Yukon, in the far northwest of Canada, was for millennia home to numerous First Nations —Gwich'in, Northern and Southern Tutchone, Inland Tlingit, Kaska, Hän and others— who lived on caribou and moose hunting and on salmon fishing in the great rivers. Since 1993 many of these nations have signed modern self-government and land claim agreements that make them an example of Indigenous administration in Canada.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the region remained on the margins of the European advance: only a few Hudson's Bay Company fur traders and a handful of missionaries had ventured into its vast territory of boreal forest, mountains and tundra. In the imagination of the south, it was the last frontier.
Everything changed on August 16, 1896, when the discovery of gold on Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River, set off one of the greatest gold rushes in history. When the news reached Seattle and San Francisco the following year, some hundred thousand adventurers from all over the world headed north along frozen routes and mountain passes such as the Chilkoot, bound for Dawson City, which in a few months went from a handful of inhabitants to a bustling town of about 17,000 in the summer of 1898.
To administer that chaos, Canada created the Yukon Territory on June 13, 1898. The rush died out as fast as it had flared up, but it left an indelible mark on the mythology of the north —immortalized by writers such as Jack London and the poet Robert Service— and left Dawson City as a living museum of that golden age.
The Yukon is a land of extreme, grandiose nature. Kluane National Park, a World Heritage Site, holds the largest non-polar icefield in the world and Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada at 5,959 meters. Whitehorse, the capital on the banks of the Yukon River, concentrates most of the territory's population and is its administrative and service center.
In summer, the midnight sun bathes the region for weeks; in winter, the northern lights light up skies of total darkness. The territory keeps a strong frontier identity, a mix of the living cultures of the First Nations and the romantic legacy of the gold seekers, in one of the wildest and least populated corners of North America.
The Yukon is today a benchmark for Indigenous reaffirmation in Canada. In 1973, the historic document 'Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow', presented by Yukon leaders to the federal government, opened a process of negotiation that culminated in 1993 with the Umbrella Final Agreement and a cascade of self-government treaties. Eleven of the territory's fourteen First Nations have signed agreements that return to them control over their lands, their resources and their institutions.
That revival is reflected in the living culture of the territory: the Gwich'in, Tutchone and Inland Tlingit languages, traditional hunting and fishing, and cultural centers displaying the art and history of these peoples. Far from the cliché of the Yukon as a mere backdrop to the gold rush, the First Nations have recovered a central role in the political and social life of the north.
Traveling through the Yukon means covering immense distances across almost untouched landscapes. The Dempster Highway, the only road in Canada that crosses the Arctic Circle, links Dawson City with Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories, cutting through the tundra of the Ogilvie and Richardson mountains. The Alaska Highway, laid down in barely eight months during the Second World War, left an indelible mark on Whitehorse and on the layout of the territory.
The great rivers —above all the Yukon itself, which was the 'highway' of the gold seekers— are still routes of adventure for canoeists from all over the world, while the Yukon Quest, one of the toughest dog sled races on the planet, revives the spirit of the north every winter. Forests, glaciers, caribou and bears round out a territory made for the traveler in search of the last wilderness.