What is the capital of North Carolina?

Raleigh is the capital of North Carolina, located in central North Carolina in the Piedmont region about 130 miles east of Charlotte and 165 miles north of the coast at Wilmington. Raleigh has been the state capital since 1792, when the legislature chose the site as a planned capital city, naming it for Sir Walter Raleigh, the English explorer who sponsored the Roanoke Colony attempts in 1585 and 1587. North Carolina was the 12th state, ratifying the Constitution on November 21, 1789. The state had earlier capitals at New Bern (1746 to 1792) and several rotating colonial sites.

Raleigh was founded as a planned city by William Christmas, who laid out a grid centered on Capitol Square with five squares set aside for state buildings. The North Carolina State Capitol, completed in 1840 in the Greek Revival style, is one of the best-preserved examples of antebellum civic architecture in the South. Today the building houses the offices of the Governor and Lieutenant Governor while the Legislature meets in the modern Legislative Building completed in 1963.

Raleigh's population is about 470,000, with a metropolitan area of about 1.5 million people, and the broader Research Triangle region (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) has about 2.2 million people. Raleigh anchors one corner of the Research Triangle, with Durham at the second corner (home of Duke University and the largest of the three cities historically) and Chapel Hill at the third (home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, founded in 1789, the oldest public university in the United States). Research Triangle Park, founded in 1959 between the three cities, is one of the largest research parks in the world and is home to thousands of technology, pharmaceutical, biotech, and research companies including IBM, Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline, Lenovo, and many others. Major universities include North Carolina State University in Raleigh (about 38,000 students), Duke University in Durham (about 17,000 students), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (about 31,000 students).

Raleigh is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, attracting tech workers, healthcare professionals, and migrants from the Northeast and Midwest. North Carolina state government includes the Governor, the bicameral General Assembly (50 senators and 120 representatives), and the North Carolina Supreme Court. North Carolina was a Confederate state from 1861 to 1865 but had significant Union sentiment in its western mountains. The state was readmitted to the Union in 1868. Raleigh has a humid subtropical climate with mild winters and hot humid summers.