Toronto is the most populous city in Canada and the provincial capital of Ontario. It is located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. Toronto, with a population of 2.8 million, is at the heart of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) which contains 6.2 million people. The city is the anchor of the Golden Horseshoe region, which wraps around Lake Ontario from Toronto to Niagara Falls and totals over 8.5 million residents, approximately a quarter of Canada’s entire population. Toronto is the fourth largest city and fifth largest urban agglomeration in North America.
A popular urban myth has it that the United Nations rated Toronto as “the most multicultural city in the world.” While the UN and its agencies are not in the habit of rating cities, it remains a fact that Canada is a nation of immigrants, and Toronto demonstrates this abundantly. A UN agency lists Toronto as second only to Miami as the city with the most foreign-born residents, but Toronto’s residents represent far more cultural and language groups, which is arguably a better measure of multi-culturalism.
Toronto’s climate on the whole is on the cool side and variable conditions can be expected. Downtown temperatures average -3.8°C (25°F) in January, but the extreme cold experienced further north typically lasts less than a week at a time. Despite this, come prepared. Winters are still cold and mostly cloudy, at some times snowy and uncomfortably windy and at other times, damp. The best times to visit for the weather are late spring/early summer or early fall, with comfortably cool nights and less crowds. Mid-summer is the peak tourist season, but visitors will find that Toronto’s vibrancy extends throughout the winter with outdoor ice rinks and bundled up clubgoers.
Toronto is generally considered to be one of North America’s top food cities. As one of the most (if not the single most) multicultural cities in the world, Toronto has authentic cuisine from most of the world’s cultural and ethnic groups. It is easy to eat out in Toronto and have a superb meal for cheap, while even the more distant neighbourhoods in the city frequently contain one or more ethnic grocers’ with both local stock and freshly imported products and brands from all over the world. Since Toronto is a city of a wide variety of distinct neighbourhoods, there are excellent restaurants scattered across the city. Many of the trendiest and hottest restaurants in Toronto are located outside of the downtown core and visitors should be prepared to travel a short drive or transit trip to visit them. As a visitor is quickly bound to notice, Torontonians virtually subsist upon coffee and tea, and the city contains an extremely high density of cafés of all types, from affordable franchise locations, to classy bars, to trendy independently owned locales with idiosyncratic brews.