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City Smart Guidebook: Calgary

Welcome to Calgary
A city of contrasts, Calgary's downtown projects its fingers of glass and steel skyward from the golden prairie. Thousands of commuters fill the city's core, dodging kamikaze bicycle couriers while bustling to work. Nearby, couples stroll leisurely along the pathways of Prince's Island Park, past fishermen casting for their dinners.

Also known as Cowtown, the gateway to the Canadian Rockies, the home of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, and the land of blue skies, green river corridors, and white Stetsons, Calgary is a young, vibrant city with a western flavour. The third-fastest-growing city in Canada, Calgary is the country's energy capital as well as one of the top centres for corporate head offices. Dynamic and cosmopolitan, Calgary is renowned for its entrepreneurial spirit.

Through a sophisticated urban centre, Calgary never strays far from its frontier heritage. Having achieved a metropolitan profile, it still retains a small-town friendliness and casual western demeanor where residents rate quality of life as its strongest attribute. Clean air, few traffic problems, modest housing costs, low crime rate, over 300 kilometres (190 miles) of pathways, and the city's proximity to the Rocky Mountains all contribute to Calgary's reputation as Canada's most livable city.

History of Calgary
Alberta's booming energy industry owes its success to geology. Millions of years ago, as marine plants and animals died, decomposed, and were buried under geological deposits, heat and pressure slowly changed the organic material into coal, oil, and gas. Meanwhile, to the west, monumental subterranean forces formed the Rocky Mountains. Later, Ice Age glaciers did some sculpting of their own, their meltwater carving through the mountains to create the channels of the Bow River. Some remnants of these glaciers can still be seen in the Rockies today.

In the ensuing years, the area's climate gradually changed, and the resulting fertile land attracted enormous herds of grazing bison. The bison supplied the native people with meat, skins for clothing and shelter, bones for tools and utensils, and sinew for thread and rope. But over time the bison numbers dwindled until, by the 1800s, they had all but vanished from the plains and settlers took over the vast prairies for farming.

In 1875, a detachment of red-coated North West Mounted Police (later renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or "Mounties") arrived . . .

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