Vaughan, a city in Ontario, Canada, is located in the Regional Municipality of York, just north of Toronto. With a population of 323,103 as of 2021, Vaughan is the fifth-largest city in the Greater Toronto Area and the 17th-largest city in Canada. Between 1996 and 2006, Vaughan was the fastest-growing municipality in Canada, with its population increasing by 80.2% during this period.
The township of Vaughan was named after Benjamin Vaughan, a British commissioner who signed a peace treaty with the United States in 1783.
In the late pre-contact period, the Huron-Wendat people populated what is today Vaughan. The first European to pass through Vaughan was the French explorer Étienne Brûlé in 1615. However, it was not until townships were created in 1792 that Vaughan began to see European settlements. Despite the hardships of pioneer life, settlers came to Vaughan in considerable numbers, with the population growing from 54 in 1800 to 4,300 in 1840. The first people to arrive were mainly Pennsylvania Germans, with a smaller number of families of English descent and a group of French Royalists. By 1846, the Township was primarily agricultural but had a population of 4,300. There were six grist mills and 25 saw mills. By 1935, there were 4,873 residents.
Vaughan is bounded by Caledon and Brampton to the west, King and Richmond Hill to the north, Markham and Richmond Hill to the east, and Toronto — in the dissolved cities of Etobicoke and North York, to the south.
The city of Vaughan is made up of nearly a dozen historic communities. Most residents identify more with these larger communities than they do with the city as a whole. These communities include Woodbridge, Maple, Thornhill, Concord, and Kleinburg.
The Vaughan Metropolitan Centre is a new 179-hectare city centre under development around the intersection of Highway 7 and Jane Street. It is served by the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre subway station, which is the northwestern terminus of Line 1 Yonge–University of the Toronto subway system. It is also a major transit hub for York Region Transit (YRT), as well as Viva and Züm bus rapid transit services.
Vaughan, like much of the Greater Toronto Area, features a continental climate Dfb and has four distinct seasons.
Vaughan offers a complex transportation infrastructure, which includes highways, public transit, regional roads, municipality-funded roads, and train services.
In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Vaughan had a population of 323,103 living in 103,914 of its 107,159 total private dwellings, a change of 5.5% from its 2016 population of 306,233. With a land area of 272.44 km2, it had a population density of 1,186.0/km2 in 2021. The median age as of 2021 was 41.6, on par with the Ontario median age of 41.6.
According to the 2021 Census, English is the mother tongue of 45.2% of the residents of Vaughan. Italian is the mother tongue for 9.8% of the population, followed by Russian (6.0%) and Mandarin (4.0%). Each of Spanish, Persian, Cantonese, Urdu, Punjabi, Hebrew, Tagalog (Filipino), Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Korean have a percentage ranging from 2.9% to 1.3%, signifying Vaughan's high linguistic diversity.
As of 2021, visible minorities make up 35.4% of the population in Vaughan.
Vaughan is home to a variety of attractions including the Baitul Islam Mosque, Boyd Conservation Area, Canada's Wonderland, Kortright Centre for Conservation, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Vaughan Mills, Reptilia Zoo, and the J. E. H. MacDonald House.
The Seed-Barker archaeological site is a 16th-century Iroquois village on the Humber River in Vaughan. It has been used as a summer school field trip site since 1976 by the Boyd archaeological field summer school for high school students.
Vaughan has several twin cities including Sora, Italy (1992), Ramla, Israel (1993), Sanjō, Japan (1993), Yangzhou, China (1995), Baguio, Philippines (1997), Delia, Italy (1998), and Lanciano, Italy (2002).
