Rideau Canal World Heritage Site
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. Counts of visitors and wishes will appear once enough people use the app.
Seals, want-to-go and the year you stood here are recorded in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
After the War of 1812, the British learned of American plans to invade Upper Canada along the St Lawrence, which could have cut Montreal off from the naval base at Kingston. A canal along the Rideau was planned as a safer military supply route.
In 1826 Lieutenant-Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers took charge of the work. Instead of digging new channels he raised the water with dams to drown the rapids. The canal was finished in spring 1832, and the first steamboat left Kingston on 22 May and reached Bytown, now Ottawa, on 29 May. It is 202 km long, with dozens of locks. As many as 1,000 workers died, mostly of malaria.
Once locks opened the St Lawrence to shipping by 1849 and a railway arrived in 1854, freight on the canal declined. It is described as the oldest continuously operated canal system in North America and was inscribed in 2007. In winter a 7.8 km stretch of its frozen surface becomes a skating rink.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).