Ottawa travel guide: overview
Selected by Queen Victoria as her Canadian capital, Ottawa is not a grandly designed capital in the style of Washington or Brasilia. The picturesque Rideau Canal winds through the downtown core – populated by pleasure craft during the summer, and by skaters during the winter, when this historic navigable waterway becomes a magical 7.8km (4.8-mile) roadway of ice in the heart of Canada’s capital.
Places to visit in Ottawa
Situated on the Ottawa River, on the border between Ontario and Quebec, Ottawa is the country's capital city. As the home of Canada's Prime Minister, the city is the inevitable butt of jokes against federal government bureaucracy, but patriots revere its parliament and the superb museums preserving Canada's cultural treasures, including the National Gallery of Canada, the National Arts Centre, the Canadian War Museum, the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Canada Science and Technology Museum to name but a few. The city makes a pretty picture in spring time when thousands of tulips, a gift from the Netherlands in gratitude for Canada's wartime hospitality to the Dutch royal family, come into bloom.
However, the contrast between settlement and wilderness, between convention and epic adventure, that runs through Canadian history has not quite vanished from Ottawa today. In the Gatineau Hills that rise up behind the city to the east, wolf packs still howl.
Read more from the travel guide to Canada
