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Portland
A Pacific Northwest city where two rivers meet
Portland sits where the Willamette River flows into the Columbia, in the northwest corner of Oregon, about 80 miles from the Pacific. The rivers made it a port — oceangoing ships reach it up the Columbia — and the head of the fertile Willamette Valley to the south gave it farmland and timber to ship. Founded in the 1840s and named by a coin toss (the loser wanted "Boston"), it grew into Oregon's largest city.
The setting is lush Pacific Northwest: mild, rainy winters, evergreen forests, and volcanoes on the horizon — snow-capped Mount Hood to the east in the Cascades and Mount St. Helens to the north across the Columbia in Washington. The Willamette divides the city east from west, crossed by a famous collection of bridges.
Framed by rivers, forest, and volcanoes, Portland anchors a metro of about 2.5 million straddling the Oregon–Washington border at the meeting of the Willamette and the Columbia.