The capital city of Saskatchewan REGINA is the commercial and administrative centre of one of the more densely populated parts of central Canada, its services anchoring a vast network of agricultural villages and towns. Yet despite its capital status, brash shopping malls and population of 204,000, Regina acts and feels like a small prairie town. It's a comfortable if unremarkable place to spend a couple of days, with the offbeat attraction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Training Academy and Museum, and the opportunity to explore some of southern Saskatchewan's less familiar destinations - such as the Big Muddy Badlands and the Grasslands National Park. If you want to improve your suntan, incidentally, you've also come to the right place - Regina gets more hours of sunshine than any other major city in Canada.

In 1881 the Indian Commissioner Edward Dewdney became lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Territories, a vast tract of land that spread west from Ontario as far as the Arctic and Pacific oceans. Almost immediately, he decided to move his capital south from the established community of Battleford to Pile O'Bones , an inconsequential dot on the map that took its name from the heaps of bleached buffalo bones left along its creek by generations of native hunters. The reason for Dewdney's decision was the routing of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental railroad across the southern plains: the capital city was renamed Regina after Queen Victoria, and Dewdney petitioned for it to be expanded on land to the north of the creek, a plot coincidentally owned by him. The site was terrible: the sluggish creek provided a poor water supply, the clay soil was muddy in wet weather and intolerably dusty in the summer, and there was no timber for building. Accordingly, the railway board refused to oblige, and the end result was farcical: Government House and the Mounted Police barracks were built where Dewdney wanted them, but the train station was a three-kilometre trek to the south.

In 1905 Regina became the capital of the newly created province of Saskatchewan , and settlers flocked here from the United States and central Europe. At the heart of an expanding wheat-growing district, the city tripled its population during its first fifteen years. It also overcame its natural disadvantages with an ambitious programme of tree-planting, which provided shade and controlled the dust, and by damming the creek to provide a better source of water. However, the city's success was based on the fragile prosperity of a one-crop economy, and throughout the twentieth century boom alternated with bust.