What is the capital of Alberta?

Edmonton is the capital of Alberta, located on the North Saskatchewan River in central Alberta about 300 kilometres north of Calgary. The city has a population of about 1.06 million in the city proper and about 1.55 million in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, making it Canada's fifth-largest metropolitan area. Edmonton has been the provincial capital since Alberta joined Canadian Confederation on September 1, 1905, when the province was carved from the Northwest Territories along with Saskatchewan.

The city was founded as Fort Edmonton, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post established in 1795 by William Tomison and named after Edmonton, the London neighbourhood of HBC deputy governor Sir James Winter Lake. Fort Edmonton moved several times during the fur trade era and was rebuilt at its current river-flats location in 1830. The city was incorporated in 1904 and chosen as the provincial capital in 1906 after a contested vote in the Alberta Legislative Assembly that pitted Edmonton against Calgary. The Alberta Legislative Assembly building, designed by Allan Merrick Jeffers and opened in 1913, sits on the riverbank above the original fort.

Edmonton's economy is driven by oil and gas (the city is the staging point for the Athabasca oil sands operations 400 kilometres north at Fort McMurray), petrochemicals at the Industrial Heartland east of the city, agriculture and food processing, healthcare and education at the University of Alberta and Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), and government services. The Edmonton International Airport is the largest airport by land area in Canada. The Edmonton Oilers of the National Hockey League (founded 1972) are the city's most prominent professional sports franchise.

Edmonton has a humid continental climate with cold dry winters (mean January temperature about minus 11 degrees Celsius) and warm summers (mean July temperature about 18 degrees Celsius). The city sits at latitude 53.5 north, the northernmost major Canadian city of more than one million people. The Edmonton North Saskatchewan River Valley Park system is the largest urban park in North America at 7,400 hectares, more than 22 times the size of Central Park in New York. The annual K-Days festival (formerly Klondike Days) celebrates the city's role as the gateway to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896 to 1899, when prospectors travelled through Edmonton to the Yukon.