Canada’s dynamic, lively, cosmopolitan and bilingual capital, Ottawa is an important city with a small-town feel. It is considered by many to be one of the world’s most attractive capitals, known for its fine architecture, green parks and food – luckily, it is also easily explorable by foot. Set along the Ottawa River, it was Queen Victoria who chose Ottawa as capital of the Province of Canada in 1857 over the likes of Toronto and Montreal, thanks to some romantic landscape paintings of the area. It was a fairly average place until the late 1940s when Paris city planner Jacques Greber came along and beautified it with parks and gardens, the basis for the picturesque city that you can explore today.
Ottawa is dominated by Parliament Hill, a limestone bluff above the river that is crowned with the three Victorian neo-Gothic buildings that house Canada’s parliament. Here, in the summer months, you can watch the daily Changing of the Guard Ceremony, and a free sound and light show in the evenings. In the area around Parliament Hill, on or near the south back of the river and either side of the Rideau Canal, you’ll find the rest of the city’s major sights – the National Gallery and its outstanding art collection, the Canadian War Museum and Canadian Museum of Nature and the buzzy restaurants, cafes and bars of Byward Market. In the winter, the Rideau Canal itself becomes the world’s longest skating rink. While Ottawa is in the province of Ontario, just across the river is Gatineau, in Quebec, which is also part of the ‘Capital Region’. A distinct place and mostly francophone, pop over to explore the beautiful Gatineau Park, and to visit the excellent Canadian Museum of History.
