Washington D.C., United States

Washington D.C. is the federal capital of the United States — a 177-square-kilometre district carved out of Maryland (and originally Virginia, returned 1846) by the 1790 Residence Act and laid out in 1791 by Pierre L'Enfant on a grand baroque plan of diagonal avenues and circular squares. The city's population (around 700,000) is small by major-American-city standards, but the wider Washington metropolitan area — the 'DMV' (DC, Maryland, Virginia) including Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, Silver Spring, Reston and Tysons — counts roughly 6.4 million residents and is the country's seventh-largest. The defining geography is the National Mall — the two-mile open landscaped axis from the United States Capitol Building (1793-1866, the legislative seat where the House of Representatives and the Senate meet) westward past the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument (169-metre marble obelisk, 1885) and the World War II Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial (1922) at the western end overlooking the Reflecting Pool. The Tidal Basin south of the Mall, planted in 1912 with 3,020 cherry trees gifted by the Mayor of Tokyo, frames the Jefferson Memorial, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial — and produces the city's defining seasonal event, the late-March-to-mid-April National Cherry Blossom Festival. The Smithsonian Institution operates 17 free museums in the Washington area (eleven of them lining the National Mall, six others in the surrounding district plus the National Zoo), with the National Museum of African American History and Culture (opened 2016), the National Air and Space Museum (the most-visited museum on the Mall), the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art (technically separate from the Smithsonian but on the Mall), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden as the major draws — admission is free at all of them. The White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW between Lafayette Square and the Ellipse is the residence of the President; public tours are available by request through a US member of Congress (or, for foreign nationals, through their embassy in Washington) with advance booking. The Capitol Building has its own visitor centre on the East Front and runs daily public tours. Beyond the federal core, the residential and commercial neighbourhoods are the city's lived-in dimension: Georgetown to the west (cobblestone streets, Federal-period red-brick townhouses, the C&O Canal towpath, Georgetown University, the Old Stone House as the city's oldest unchanged building), Dupont Circle (consulates, bookshops, the Phillips Collection, the city's principal LGBTQ+ neighbourhood), Adams Morgan (international restaurants), Capitol Hill (residential and the Eastern Market), the U Street Corridor (the historic 'Black Broadway' jazz district where Duke Ellington grew up, with Ben's Chili Bowl as the institution), Shaw, NoMa, the Wharf along the Southwest waterfront (redeveloped 2017-2022), and Anacostia east of the Anacostia River (the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, the Anacostia Community Museum). The diplomatic quarter splits between Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue NW (between Dupont Circle and the Naval Observatory), the Kalorama Triangle and the Sheridan-Kirk neighbourhood — Washington has the largest diplomatic presence of any city other than New York and Brussels, with roughly 180 foreign missions accredited to the United States and almost all of them located in the District. Three airports serve the metropolitan region: Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA, six kilometres south on the Virginia side of the Potomac, primarily domestic with a handful of Caribbean and Canadian flights, reachable in 12 minutes by Yellow/Blue Line Metro), Washington Dulles International (IAD, 42 kilometres west in Virginia, the international hub with the Silver Line Metro extension since 2022), and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall (BWI, 50 kilometres north in Maryland, served by MARC commuter rail and Amtrak from Union Station). The Washington Metro (six colour-coded lines, opened 1976) and the Metrobus network are operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA); a SmarTrip card (or contactless card via Apple Pay / Google Pay) is the standard fare medium. Union Station, the Beaux-Arts 1907 railway terminal three blocks north of the Capitol, is the Amtrak hub for the Northeast Corridor — Acela trains reach New York Penn Station in 2h 50min, Philadelphia in 1h 30min, and Boston in 6h 30min.