St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador  St. John's is the capital and largest city of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is on the eastern tip of the Avalon Peninsula on the large Canadian island Newfoundland. The city spans and is the easternmost city in North America (excluding Greenland). Its name has been attributed to the Nativity of John the Baptist, when John Cabot was believed to have sailed into the harbour in 1497 and to a Basque fishing town with the same name. Existing on maps as early as 1519, it is one of the oldest cities in North America. It was officially incorporated as a city in 1888. With a metropolitan population of approximately 219,207 (as of 1 July 2017), the St. John's Metropolitan Area is Canada's 20th largest metropolitan area and the second largest Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) in Atlantic Canada, after Halifax. The city has a rich history, having played a role in the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812. Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless signal in St. John's. Its history and culture have made it into an important tourist destination. John's is the oldest post-Columbian European settlement in North America, with fishermen setting up seasonal camps in the early 16th century. Sebastian Cabot declared in a handwritten Latin text in his original 1545 map that St. John's earned its name when he and his father, the Venetian explorer John Cabot, in the service of England, became the first Europeans to sail into the harbour, on the morning of 24 June 1494 (against British and French historians stating 1497), the feast day of Saint John the Baptist. However, the locations of Cabot's landfalls are disputed. A series of expeditions to St. John's by Portuguese from the Azores took place in the early 16th century, and by 1540 French, Spanish and Portuguese ships crossed the Atlantic annually to fish the waters off the Avalon Peninsula. In the Basque Country, it is a common belief the name of St. John's was given by Basque fishermen because the bay of St. John's is very similar to the Bay of Pasaia in the Basque Country, where one of the fishing towns is called St. John (in Spanish, San Juan, and in Basque, Donibane). The earliest record of the location appears as "São João" on a Portuguese map by Pedro Reinel in 1519.