Wood Buffalo
Wood Buffalo is a region that covers the entire northeastern quadrant of Alberta, Canada. The entire region is drained by the Athabasca River, a major river that goes on to empty into the world's largest inland delta inside Wood Buffalo National Park.Photo: CLS Research Office, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Essential Destinations
Top destinations include Fort McMurray and Fort Chipewyan.
Fort McMurray
Photo: jasonwoodhead23, CC BY 2.0.
Fort McMurray is the largest community in the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta. It lost its city status in 1995 when it merged with a large rural area to form the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo and its fortunes have risen and fallen in lockstep with the price of Alberta crude oil; its structures were decimated by a May 2016 wildfire.
Fort Chipewyan
Photo: Mark S. Elliott, CC BY 2.5.
Fort Chipewyan is a hamlet on the western shores of Lake Athabasca 250 km north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. It had a population of 798 in 2021.
Fort McKay
Photo: J Hazard, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Fort McKay is a small First Nations village in Wood Buffalo with a population of 621 in 2021. Like Fort McMurray 60 km to the south, the hamlet of Fort MacKay is part of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.
Wood Buffalo
- Type: specialized municipality in Alberta with 82,400 residents
- Description: specialized municipality in northeastern Alberta, Canada
- Also known as: “Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo”
- Neighbors: Wood Buffalo National Park
- Location: Northern Alberta, Alberta, Prairies, Canada, North America
- View on OpenStreetMap
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Satellite Map
Discover Wood Buffalo from above in high-definition satellite imagery.
In Other Languages
From Arabic to Ukrainian—“Wood Buffalo” goes by many names.
- Arabic: “منطقة وودبفالو”
- Cebuano: “Wood Buffalo”
- Chinese: “伍德布法罗地区自治市”
- Chinese: “伍德布法羅地區自治市”
- Dutch: “Wood Buffalo”
- Finnish: “Wood Buffalo”
- French: “Municipalité régionale de Wood Buffalo”
- French: “Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo”
- French: “Wood Buffalo”
- German: “Wood Buffalo”
- Italian: “Wood Buffalo”
- Japanese: “ウッドバッファロー”
- Norwegian Bokmål: “Wood Buffalo”
- Norwegian Nynorsk: “Wood Buffalo”
- Norwegian: “Wood Buffalo”
- Romanian: “Wood Buffalo, Alberta”
- Romanian: “Wood Buffalo”
- Serbian: “Вуд Бафало”
- Slovenian: “Wood Buffalo”
- Spanish: “Municipalidad Regional de Wood Buffalo”
- Swahili: “Wood Buffalo, Alberta”
- Swahili: “Wood Buffalo”
- Swedish: “Wood Buffalo”
- Ukrainian: “Вуд-Баффало”
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