Ottawa

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, a city in eastern Ontario on the south bank of the Ottawa River, facing Gatineau in Quebec. Its name comes from the Algonquin word adawe, to trade, the name of the Odawa people. Each May the Canadian Tulip Festival fills its parks with tulips, a custom that began with bulbs sent by the Dutch royal family after the Second World War.

The town began in 1826 as Bytown, named after Lieutenant-Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers, who built the Rideau Canal from the Ottawa River to Kingston on Lake Ontario. In winter the canal freezes into a skating path through the center of the city. Timber from the forests of the Ottawa valley floated down to its sawmills and paid for its early growth. The town took the name Ottawa in 1855, and Queen Victoria chose it a few years later as the capital of the Province of Canada, partly because it lay between English and French Canada. It became the capital of the new Dominion of Canada at Confederation in the 1860s.

Shopify, founded in Ottawa, makes the software that runs online stores for merchants in many countries. Corel, based in the city, developed the CorelDRAW graphics program and later bought the WordPerfect word processor. The Royal Canadian Mint strikes collector coins and the gold Maple Leaf bullion coin at its Ottawa plant.

The Centre Block on Parliament Hill, in Gothic Revival style, is crowned by the Peace Tower with its carillon of bells. The National Gallery of Canada, designed by Moshe Safdie with a tall glass hall at its entrance, keeps Maman, a giant bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois, on its plaza. The Ottawa Senators, a National Hockey League club, carry the name of an earlier team that won the Stanley Cup several times in the 1900s and 1920s.