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In the Rocky Mountains, snow-capped mountain ranges tower above dark green forested slopes, salmon-filled rivers run through valleys, and thousands of turquoise lakes mirror the glow of glaciers on the peaks. In the country’s south, the endless prairies have been taken over by agriculture, while further north, the taiga and then the tundra along the Arctic Circle dominate the landscape. The traces of the ancient ice castles, and the terrible power of the ice, are now visible in the ice-carved islands of the archipelago, with their vast interconnecting lakes and narrow sea channels filling the ice-carved depressions. The ice sheet stretched to the Great Lakes during the Great Ice Age. The ranges of the Rocky Mountains share the rest.

Around four-fifths of it is built up by ancient rocks eroded by glaciers in the Canadian Icecap. The country, the size of Europe, has just under three times our population. Bilingual Canada is a member of the Commonwealth. Northwards, sailors, explorers, trappers, and adventurers searched in vain for centuries for a shipping route to the Pacific Ocean, the legendary Northwest Passage. The first Europeans to set foot on Canadian soil were the Vikings, who landed at New Foundland at the end of the first millennium AD, followed by the French in the first century AD and the English a century later.