- published: 18 Feb 2013
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Vancouver (i/væŋˈkuːvər/ or /vænˈkuːvər/) officially the City of Vancouver, is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada.
The 2011 census recorded 603,502 people in the city, making it the eighth largest Canadian municipality. The Greater Vancouver area of around 2.4 million inhabitants is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country, the second largest city on the United States–Canada border, and the most populous in Western Canada. Vancouver is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities in Canada; 52% of its residents have a first language other than English. Vancouver is classed as a Beta global city. The City of Vancouver encompasses a land area of about 114 square kilometres, giving it a population density of about 5,249 people per square kilometre (13,590 per square mile). Vancouver is the most densely populated Canadian municipality, and the fourth most densely populated city with over 250,000 residents in North America, behind New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico City.
Fort Vancouver was a 19th-century fur trading outpost along the Columbia River that served as the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company's Columbia Department, located in the Oregon Country. Named for Captain George Vancouver, the fort was located on the northern bank of the Columbia River in present-day Vancouver, Washington. Today, a full-scale replica of the fort, with internal buildings, has been constructed and is open to the public as Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.
The outpost was established in the winter of 1824–1825. At that time, the region known as the Columbia District of the Hudson's Bay Company, and increasingly as the Oregon Country to Americans, was jointly occupied by the United States and Britain; a situation agreed to in the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. British interests were represented by the Hudson's Bay Company, which had exclusive trading rights to most of the land that is now Western Canada. To protect their interests north of the Columbia River, they sought to set up a headquarters somewhere along the northern bank that would secure the area and act as the hub for their fur trading in the Pacific Northwest; replacing Fort George (Fort Astoria) in that capacity as it was on the river's south bank and not as convenient to the inland trade.