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Vancouver
Canada's Pacific gateway, between the sea and the Coast Mountains
Vancouver sits where the Coast Mountains plunge to the Pacific, a glass city wedged between snow-capped peaks and the sea that ranks among the most spectacularly situated metropolises on Earth. Some 2.7 million people live in its metropolitan area, Canada's third-largest and its principal Pacific port and gateway to Asia. Famously mild, rainy, and outdoorsy, it is a place where residents can ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon, and where a forest of slim residential towers has reshaped the downtown skyline.
The city occupies a peninsula and the surrounding lowlands at the mouth of the Fraser River, hemmed in by the mountains to the north and the U.S. border to the south, constraints that have pushed it to grow upward rather than outward. The North Shore Mountains rise abruptly across Burrard Inlet, the deep harbor that makes Vancouver a major port. Stanley Park, a thousand-acre rainforest, occupies the tip of the downtown peninsula. The marine climate brings mild, wet winters and famously gray skies, while the deep, ice-free harbor stays open year round, anchoring the city's role as Canada's Pacific trade hub.
A sawmill settlement called Granville grew on Burrard Inlet in the 1860s, and the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886 transformed it into the renamed city of Vancouver, its western terminus. The port grew on timber, fish, and grain, and waves of immigration, especially from Asia, gave it one of the largest ethnic Chinese populations of any North American city. Real estate booms and the 2010 Winter Olympics raised its global profile and its housing costs. Today Vancouver is Canada's window on the Pacific, a wealthy, diverse, and dramatically scenic metropolis.