Founding
capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba, Canada
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Winnipeg is the capital and largest city of the Canadian province of Manitoba. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. As of 2021, Winnipeg had a city population of 749,607 and a metropolitan population of 834,678, making it Canada's sixth-largest city and eighth-largest metropolitan area. In 2025, the city's estimated population reached 850,260.
The city is named after the nearby Lake Winnipeg; the name "Winnipeg" comes from the Western Cree words for "muddy water" – winipīhk. The region was a trading centre for Indigenous peoples long before the arrival of Europeans; it is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe (Ojibway), Ininew (Cree), Oji-Cree, Dene, and Dakota, and is the birthplace of the Métis Nation. French traders built the first fort, Fort Rouge, on the site in 1738. A settlement was later founded by the Selkirk settlers of the Red River Colony in 1812, the nucleus of which was incorporated as the "City of Winnipeg" in 1873. Being far inland, the city's climate is extremely seasonal (continental) even by Canadian standards, with average January highs of around −11 °C (12 °F) and average July highs of 26 °C (79 °F).
Known as the "Gateway to the West", Winnipeg is a railway and transportation hub with a diversified economy. It hosts numerous annual festivals, including the Festival du Voyageur, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Jazz Winnipeg Festival, the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, and Folklorama. Winnipeg was the first Canadian host of the Pan American Games in 1967. It is home to several professional sports franchises, including the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (Canadian football), Winnipeg Jets (ice hockey), Manitoba Moose (ice hockey), Winnipeg Sea Bears (basketball), and the Winnipeg Goldeyes (baseball).
Winnipeg is named after nearby Lake Winnipeg, 65 kilometres (40 mi) north of the city. English explorer Henry Kelsey may have been the first European to see the lake in 1690. He adopted the Cree and Ojibwe name, win-nipi (also transcribed win-nipiy or ouenpig), meaning "murky water" or "muddy water" (modern Cree: wīnipēk, ᐑᓂᐯᐠ). French-Canadian fur trader La Vérendrye referred to the lake as Lac Gouinipique or Ouinipigon when he built the first forts in the area in the 1730s. Local newspaper The Nor'-Wester included the name on its masthead on 24 February 1866, and the city was incorporated by that name by the Manitoba Legislature in 1873.
Winnipeg lies at the confluence of the Assiniboine and the Red River of the North, a location now known as "The Forks". This point was at the crossroads of canoe routes travelled by First Nations before European contact. Evidence provided by archaeology, petroglyphs, rock art, and oral history indicates that native peoples used the area in prehistoric times for camping, harvesting, hunting, tool making, fishing, trading and, farther north, for agriculture.
Estimates of the date of first settlement in the area range from 11,500 years ago for a site southwest of the present city to 6,000 years ago at the Forks. In 1805, Canadian colonists observed First Nations peoples engaged in farming activity along the Red River. The practice quickly expanded, driven by the demand by traders for provisions. The rivers provided an extensive transportation network linking northern First Peoples with those to the south along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The Ojibwe made some of the first maps on birch bark, which helped fur traders navigate the waterways of the area.
Sieur de La Vérendrye built the first fur-trading post on the site in 1738, called Fort Rouge. French trading continued at the site for several decades. The British Hudson's Bay Company took over when France ceded the territory following its defeat in the Seven Years' War. Many French men who were trappers married First Nations women; their mixed-race children hunted, traded, and lived in the area. Their descendants are known as the Métis.
Lord Selkirk was involved with the first permanent settlement (known as the Red River Colony), the purchase of land from the Hudson's Bay Company, and a survey of river lots in the early 19th century. The North West Company built Fort Gibraltar in 1809, and the Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Douglas in 1812, both in the area of present-day Winnipeg. The two companies competed fiercely over trade. The Métis and Lord Selkirk's settlers fought at the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816. In 1821, the Hudson's Bay and North West Companies merged, ending their long rivalry. Fort Gibraltar was renamed Fort Garry in 1822 and became the leading post in the region for the Hudson's Bay Company. A flood destroyed the fort in 1826 and it was not rebuilt until 1835. A rebuilt section of the fort, consisting of the front gate and a section of the wall, is near the modern-day corner of Main Street and Broadway in downtown Winnipeg.
In 1869–70, present-day Winnipeg was the site of the Red River Rebellion, a conflict between the local provisional government of Métis, led by Louis Riel, and newcomers from eastern Canada. General Garnet Wolseley was sent to suppress the uprising. The Manitoba Act of 1870 made Manitoba the fifth province of the three-year-old Canadian Confederation. Treaty 1, which encompassed the city and much of the surrounding area, was signed on 3 August 1871 by representatives of the Crown and local Indigenous groups, comprising the Brokenhead Ojibway, Sagkeeng, Long Plain, Peguis, Roseau River Anishinabe, Sandy Bay and Swan Lake communities. On 8 November 1873, Winnipeg was incorporated as a city, with the Selkirk settlement as its nucleus. Métis legislator and interpreter James McKay named the city. Winnipeg's mandate was to govern and provide municipal services to citizens attracted to trade expansion between Upper Fort Garry / Lower Fort Garry and Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Winnipeg developed rapidly after the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1881. The railway divided the North End, which housed mainly Eastern Europeans, from the richer Anglo-Saxon southern part of the city. It also contributed to a demographic shift beginning shortly after Confederation that saw the francophone population decrease from a majority to a small minority group. This shift resulted in Premier Thomas Greenway controversially ending legislative bilingualism and removing funding for French Catholic Schools in 1890.
By 1911, Winnipeg was Canada's third-largest city. However, the city faced financial difficulty when the Panama Canal opened in 1914. The canal reduced reliance on Canada's rail system for international trade; the increase in shipping traffic helped Vancouver to surpass Winnipeg in both prosperity and population by the end of World War I.
More than 30,000 workers walked off their jobs in May 1919 in what came to be known as the Winnipeg general strike. The strike was a product of postwar recession, labour conditions, the activity of union organizers and a large influx of returning World War I soldiers seeking work. After many arrests, deportations, and incidents of violence, the strike ended on 21 June 1919 when the Riot Act was read. A group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers charged a group of strikers. Two strikers were killed and at least thirty others were injured on the day that became known as Bloody Saturday; the event polarized the population. One of the leaders of the strike, J. S. Woodsworth, went on to found Canada's first major socialist party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which later became the New Democratic Party.
The Manitoba Legislative Building, constructed mainly of Tyndall stone, opened in 1920; its dome supports a bronze statue finished in gold leaf, titled "Eternal Youth and the Spirit of Enterprise" (commonly known as the "Golden Boy"). Proportional voting was also introduced in 1920, and used provincially until 1957. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression resulted in widespread unemployment, worsened by drought and low agricultural prices. The Depression ended after the start of World War II in 1939.
In the Battle of Hong Kong, The Winnipeg Grenadiers were among the first Canadians to engage in combat against Japanese military forces. Battalion members who survived combat were taken prisoner and endured brutal treatment in prisoner of war camps. In 1942, the Victory Loan Campaign staged a mock Nazi invasion of Winnipeg to promote awareness of the stakes of the war in Europe. When the war ended, pent-up demand generated a boom in housing development, although building activity was checked by the 1950 Red River flood. The federal government estimated damage at over $26 million, although the province indicated that it was at least double that. The damage caused by the flood led then-Premier Duff Roblin to advocate for the construction of the Red River Floodway.
Before 1972, Winnipeg was the largest of thirteen cities and towns in a metropolitan area around the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. In 1960, the Metropolitan Corporation of Greater Winnipeg was established to co-ordinate service delivery in the metropolitan region. A consolidated metropolitan "unicity" government incorporating Winnipeg and its surrounding municipalities was established on 27 July 1971, taking effect in 1972. The City of Winnipeg Act incorporated the current city. In 2003, the City of Winnipeg Act was repealed and replaced with the City of Winnipeg Charter.
Winnipeg experienced a severe economic downturn in advance of the early 1980s recession, during which the city incurred closures of prominent businesses, including the Winnipeg Tribune, as well as the Swift's and Canada Packers meat packing plants. In 1981, Winnipeg was one of the first cities in Canada to sign a tripartite agreement with the provincial and federal governments to redevelop its downtown area, and the three levels of government contributed over $271 million to its development. In 1989, the reclamation and redevelopment of the CNR rail yards turned the Forks into Winnipeg's most popular tourist attraction. The city was threatened by the 1997 Red River flood as well as further floods in 2009 and 2011.
Winnipeg lies at the bottom of the Red River Valley, a flood plain with an extremely flat topography. It is on the eastern edge of the Canadian Prairies in Western Canada and is known as the "Gateway to the West". Winnipeg is bordered by tallgrass prairie to the west and south and the aspen parkland to the northeast, although most of the native prairie grasses have been removed for agriculture and urbanization. It is relatively close to many large Canadian Shield lakes and parks, as well as Lake Winnipeg (the Earth's 11th largest freshwater lake). Winnipeg has North America's largest extant mature urban elm forest. The city has an area of 464.08 square kilometres (179.18 sq mi).
Winnipeg has four major rivers: the Red, Assiniboine, La Salle and Seine. The city was subject to severe flooding in the past. The Red River reached its greatest flood height in 1826. Another large flood in 1950 caused millions of dollars in damage and mass evacuations. This flood prompted Duff Roblin's provincial government to build the Red River Floodway to protect the city. In the 1997 flood, flood control dikes were reinforced and raised using sandbags; Winnipeg suffered limited damage compared to the flood's impact on cities without such structures, such as Grand Forks, North Dakota. The generally flat terrain and the poor drainage of the Red River Valley's clay-based soil also results in many mosquitoes during wetter years.
Winnipeg's location in the Canadian Prairies gives it a warm-summer humid continental climate (Köppen: Dfb), with warm, humid summers, and long, severely cold winters. Summers have a July mean average of 19.7 °C (67.5 °F). Winters are the coldest time of year, with the January mean average around −16.4 °C (2.5 °F) and total winter precipitation (December through February) averaging 55.2 millimetres (2.17 in). Temperatures occasionally drop below −40 °C (−40 °F).
On average, there are 317.8 days per year with measurable sunshine, with July seeing the most. With 2,353 hours of sunshine per year, Winnipeg is the second-sunniest city in Canada. Total annual precipitation (both rain and snow) is just over 521 millimetres (20.5 in). Thunderstorms are very common during summer and sometimes severe enough to produce tornadoes. Low wind chill values are a common occurrence in the local climate. The wind chill has gone down as low as −57.1 °C (−70.8 °F), and on average twelve days of the year reach a wind chill below −40 °C (−40 °F). Deaths have been recorded relating to the extreme cold.
The highest temperature ever recorded in Winnipeg was during the 1936 North American heat wave. The temperature reached 42.2 °C (108.0 °F) on 11 July 1936 while the highest minimum temperature, recorded on the following day, 12 July 1936, was 28.3 °C (82.9 °F). The apparent heat can be even more extreme due to bursts of humidity, and on 12 July 2026 a humidex reading of 48.0 °C (118.4 °F) was measured.
The frost-free season is comparatively long for a location with such severe winters. The last spring frost is on average around 23 May, while the first fall frost is on 22 September.
There are officially 237 neighbourhoods in Winnipeg. Downtown Winnipeg, the city's financial heart and economic core, is centred on the intersection of Portage Avenue and Main Street and covers about 2.6 square kilometres (1.0 sq mi). More than 72,000 people work downtown, and over 40,000 students attend classes at its universities and colleges.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Winnipeg”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.