extracted from wikipedia.org

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, and the country's fourth largest city. It is located in the Ottawa Valley on the eastern edge of the province of Ontario, right at the border with the province of Quebec. A bilingual city, Ottawa is about 400 km (250 miles) east of Toronto and 190 km (120 miles) west of Montreal. It lies on the banks of the Ottawa River, a major waterway that forms the border between the two provinces. Unlike the capital cities of countries like the United States, Brazil, People's Republic of China, Mexico, and Australia, there is no federal capital district in Canada: Ottawa is a municipality within the Province of Ontario. Although it does not constitute a separate administrative district, Ottawa is part of the officially-designated National Capital Region which includes neighbouring Quebec municipalities such as Gatineau. The population of the city proper is 808,391, while the population of the larger Census Metropolitan Area is 1,146,790 (2004). As with other national capitals, the word "Ottawa" is also used to refer by metonymy to the country's federal government, especially as opposed to provincial or municipal authorities.	Parliament Hill
Canada's finest	The Ottawa region was long home to First Nations peoples who were part of the Algonquin. The Algonquin called the river the Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi, meaning "Great River". The first European settlement in the region was that of Philemon Wright who started a community on the Quebec side of the river in 1800. Wright discovered that transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Montreal was possible and the area was soon booming based almost entirely off timber. In the years following the War of 1812, in addition to settling some military regiment families, the government began sponsored immigration schemes which brought over Irish Catholics and Protestants to settle the Ottawa area, which began a steady stream of Irish immigration there in the next few decades. Along with French Canadians who crossed over from Quebec, these two groups provided the bulk of labourers involved in the Rideau Canal project and the booming timber trade, both instrumental in putting Ottawa on the map.
The region's population grew significantly when the canal was completed and constructed by Colonel John By in 1832. It was intended to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, by-passing the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering New York State (with the 1812 conflict with the U.S.A. being in recent memory). Construction of the canal began at the northern end, where Colonel By set up a military barracks on what later became Parliament Hill, and laid out a townsite that soon became known as Bytown. Original city leaders of Bytown include a number of Wright's sons, most notably Ruggles Wright. Nicholas Sparks, Braddish Billings and Abraham Dow who were the first to settle on the Ontario side of the Ottawa river. The west side of the canal became known as "Uppertown" where the Parliament buildings are located, while the east side of the canal (wedged between the canal and Rideau River) was known as the "Lowertown". At that time, Lowertown was a crowded, boisterous shanty town, frequently receiving the worst of disease epidemics, such as the Cholera outbreak in 1832 or later typhus in 1847.  Bytown was renamed Ottawa in 1855. On December 31, 1857, Queen Victoria was asked to choose a common capital for the then province of Canada (modern Quebec and Ontario) and chose Ottawa. There are old folk tales about how she made the choice: that she did so by sticking her hatpin on a map roughly halfway between Toronto and Montreal, or that she liked watercolours she had seen of the area. While such stories have no historical basis, they do illustrate how arbitrary the choice of Ottawa seemed to Canadians at the time. While Ottawa is now a major metropolis and Canada's fourth largest city, at the time it was a sometimes unruly logging town in the hinterland, far away from the colony's main cities, Quebec City and Montreal in Canada East, and Kingston and Toronto in Canada West.	The Ottawa Ex every August is enjoyed by all
Shopping at the Byward Market	In fact, the Queen's advisors had her pick Ottawa for three important reasons: first, it was the only settlement of any significant size located right on the border of Canada East and Canada West (Quebec/Ontario border today), making it a compromise between the two colonies and their French and English populations; second, the War of 1812 had shown how vulnerable the major cities were to American attack, since they were all located very close to the border while Ottawa was (then) surrounded by a dense forest far from the border; third, the government owned a large parcel of land on a spectacular spot overlooking the Ottawa River. Ottawa's position in the back country made it more defensible, while still allowing easy transportation via the Ottawa River to Canada East and the Rideau Canal to Canada West. Two other considerations were that Ottawa was at a point nearly exactly midway between Toronto and Quebec City (about 500 km) and that the small size of the town made it less likely that politically motivated mobs could go on a rampage and destroy government buildings, as had been the case in the previous Canadian capitals.
The original Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa was destroyed by fire on February 3, 1916. The House of Commons and Senate were temporarily relocated to the recently constructed Victoria Memorial Museum, currently the Canadian Museum of Nature, located about 1 km south of Parliament Hill on Metcalfe Street. A new Centre Block was completed in 1922, the centre-piece of which is a dominant Gothic revival styled structure known as the Peace Tower which has become a common emblem of the city.   On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet embassy with over 100 secret documents. At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, since the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment listening to his own being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy networking operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans.	The Rideau Canal in winter turns into the worlds biggest skating rink.

Ottawa Gallery