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Toronto
Canada's largest city, a multicultural metropolis on Lake Ontario
Toronto crowds the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario, a city of glass condominium towers and one needle-thin landmark that has become the financial and cultural center of English-speaking Canada. Its metropolitan region holds well over six million people, making it Canada's largest urban area and one of the most diverse cities on Earth, where roughly half the residents were born outside the country. It is the seat of the nation's banks, its stock exchange, and a media and tech economy that has drawn newcomers from every continent.
The city occupies a gently sloping plain that rises from the lakeshore toward a series of old shoreline ridges to the north, cut by deep ravines that carry rivers and creeks down to the lake. The CN Tower, for decades the tallest free-standing structure in the world, anchors a downtown that has sprouted a forest of residential towers in the past two decades. The Toronto Islands shelter the harbor, and Lake Ontario both moderates the climate and feeds the lake-effect weather. The flat, fertile land of the surrounding region made it a natural place for a settlement to spread outward into sprawling suburbs.
The British established the town of York here in 1793 on land obtained from the Mississaugas, choosing the sheltered harbor as the capital of Upper Canada. Renamed Toronto in 1834, the city grew as a commercial and industrial center, long overshadowed by Montreal until the late twentieth century, when it overtook its rival to become the country's economic capital. Postwar immigration transformed it from a staid Anglo-Protestant town into a global mosaic of neighborhoods and languages. Today Toronto is Canada's financial heart and a byword for multicultural urban life.