Iqaluit
Capital Of Nunavut Since 1999; Founded As The Wartime Airbase At Frobisher Bay, Now The Territory'S Largest Community And Its Air Gateway · Iqaluit, Nunavut
Iqaluit means place of many fish, and for most of its history that was all it was - a good fishing spot at the head of Frobisher Bay where Inuit families had camped for generations. Then in 1942 the Americans built an airstrip here as a staging post for ferrying aircraft to Europe, a town grew around it, and in 1999 it became the capital of a territory covering a fifth of Canada. About seventy-five hundred people live here now. There is no road to anywhere else: the entire network runs to roughly forty kilometres, and everything arrives by air or on the summer sealift, which is why a bag of groceries costs what it does. What a visitor finds is a working northern capital rather than a spectacle - an Anglican cathedral built in the shape of an igloo, a legislature whose mace is tipped with narwhal ivory, a museum in an old Hudson's Bay building, and tundra starting at the edge of the last street.
Iqaluit, Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada
Iqaluit is a working capital city with no gate and no admission. THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY runs free scheduled tours on weekdays and NUNATTA SUNAKKUTAANGIT MUSEUM keeps limited daytime hours, often free or by donation - do both early in your stay, because small-capital opening hours change at short notice. ST. JUDE'S CATHEDRAL is generally open outside services. THERE IS NO ROAD TO IQALUIT: access is by air only, and WEATHER CANCELS FLIGHTS REGULARLY with no overland alternative, so build spare days into any itinerary. Toonik Tyme, the spring festival, falls in April.