The story of Canada’s tulip festival begins in an Ottawa Civic Hospital room during World War II.
At the time, several members of the Dutch Royal family were exiled in Canada. One of them, Princess Juliana, gave birth to a daughter, Margriet, in 1943, and the Canadian government declared the maternity room Dutch soil so that Margriet could keep her mother’s citizenship.
In 1945, Princess Juliana, back home in the Netherlands, expressed her gratitude with a gift of 100,000 tulip bulbs. From this gesture of friendship grew the largest tulip festival in the world. Today, the eighteen day event celebrates the tulip’s annual bloom with over three million flowers and draws over 600,000 people.
Although crowding in front of the tulip beds for pictures is undeniably the main draw, the festival also offers many other free attractions, including theatre, acrobatics, dance and performances by international and homegrown superstars (a 12-year-old Alanis Morissette made her debut here in 1987).
And when you get hungry, you can wander through the International Pavilion, which symbolizes the festival’s roots in international friendship with the food and culture of twenty-four countries.
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By Asha Jhamandas and Stephen Okazawa
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