About 154 km (96 mi) long, the Strait of Juan de Fuca (officially Juan de Fuca Strait in Canada) is the main channel joining the Salish Sea to the Pacific Ocean. It separates Vancouver Island in British Columbia from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, and the border between Canada and the United States runs down its centre. It opens to the ocean between Cape Flattery and Carmanah Point. At its eastern end it splits into Haro Strait, Rosario Strait and Admiralty Inlet, which lead on to the San Juan Islands, the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound. Ocean shipping bound for Seattle and Tacoma passes through it, and its shores support Coast Salish and Makah communities, the provincial capital of Victoria, Canada's Pacific naval base and a string of Washington towns. The fur trader Charles William Barkley named it in 1787 after Juan de Fuca, a Greek navigator in Spanish service who claimed to have found a strait here in 1592. Whether that voyage ever happened is doubted; the historian Samuel Bawlf called the story a fabrication in 2003.
The strait's story is best told through the people who live along it, from the whaling town at its mouth to the city at its inner end.
Makah whalers at Neah Bay and Cape Flattery
The south shore of the strait's mouth belongs to the Makah, whose reservation fills the north-western tip of the Olympic Peninsula. Archaeology shows that people have lived around Neah Bay for more than 6,000 years. They lived in cedar longhouses and hunted seals, gray whales and humpbacks from dugout canoes. Their own name, qʷidiččaʔa·tx̌, is usually translated as "the people who live by the rocks and seagulls". "Makah" comes from the Klallam word for them, meaning "generous with food". Their closest relatives are the Nuu-chah-nulth and Ditidaht peoples of Vancouver Island's west coast, directly across the water.
On 31 January 1855 Makah representatives signed the Treaty of Neah Bay, which gave up most of their land but kept their right to hunt whales and seals. They stopped whaling in the 1920s because commercial whalers had depleted the gray and humpback whales. After the gray whale was taken off the US endangered species list, the Makah went back to sea, and on 17 May 1999 they landed a gray whale, their first in more than 70 years. Neah Bay had 935 residents at the 2020 census. In summer it fills with sport fishers. Visitors also come for the Cape Trail and the Makah Museum, which holds artefacts from a Makah village partly buried by a mudslide around 1750. Since 1999 the town has also been the base of an emergency rescue tug, which has helped 41 vessels in trouble at the mouth of the strait. Humpback whales feed near Neah Bay and La Push from about June to November, and the gray whale migration passes from March to May.
The Klallam, the Elwha dams and the salmon's return
East of the Makah, the southern shore is Klallam country. Their name, S'Klallam, means "the strong people", and their territory covered the north and north-east of the Olympic Peninsula. One village, Tse-whit-zen, lay on the bay sheltered by Ediz Hook, where Port Angeles now stands. Its remains were found during a state construction project in August 2003. Radiocarbon dating suggests the village was occupied for nearly 2,700 years. After the find, the state abandoned the project at that site. Since the 1930s the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has had a reservation at the mouth of the Elwha River, four miles west of the city.
The Elwha shaped their livelihood more than anything else. In the early 20th century two dams were built across it: the 33 m (108 ft) Elwha Dam, completed in 1913, and the 64 m (210 ft) Glines Canyon Dam upstream. Together they blocked the salmon runs, and Lake Aldwell, the Elwha Dam's reservoir, drowned a rock the Klallam regard as the place of their creation. The tribe pushed for decades for the dams to come down. The Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act was passed in 1992, and demolition began in September 2011. The Elwha Dam was gone by March 2012 and Glines Canyon by August 2014, in what was then the largest dam removal project in history, projected to cost about $350 million. The river has reopened about 70 miles (110 km) of spawning habitat inside Olympic National Park, where almost the whole watershed is protected from farm runoff, which Park Service models say could support up to 392,000 fish.
The strait itself changed too. About 25 million cubic yards of sediment had built up behind the two dams. By November 2014 about 30% of it had reached the river mouth, creating some 70 acres (28 ha) of new estuary habitat for shellfish and other species. After Lake Aldwell was drained in 2012, tribal members rediscovered their sacred creation site that August, the first time any living member had seen it.
Port Angeles, Sequim and Port Townsend in the rain shadow
The Washington shore has a sharp change in rainfall along its length. The western end of the strait gets more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of rain a year, enough for temperate rainforest. Near Sequim, sheltered by the Olympic Mountains, it falls to about 16 inches (410 mm). That gradient decides how people make a living along the shore.
Port Angeles, the seat of Clallam County, is the largest city on the Olympic Peninsula, with 19,960 people in 2020. The Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza named its harbour Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in 1791. President Abraham Lincoln later set aside 3,520 acres there as a federal reserve, and the town laid out on it was later nicknamed the "Second National City". It began as a whaling, fishing and shipping village trading with Victoria, and it is still the American end of the main car ferry across the strait.
Sequim, with 8,024 people in 2020, takes its name from a Klallam word meaning "hunting ground". It turned its dry, sunny weather into a lavender industry and calls itself the "Lavender Capital of North America". The Dungeness crab is named after the nearby Dungeness Spit. Sequim is also home to the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe, and the Manis Mastodon site nearby shows people hunting in the area about 14,000 years ago. At the strait's inner corner, Port Townsend (10,148 people in 2020) gets only about 19 inches (480 mm) of rain. Its Victorian buildings date from a late-19th-century boom, and it remains a centre for independent boatbuilders, with an annual Wooden Boat Festival.
Victoria, Esquimalt and the boundary down the middle
The northern shore is dominated by Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. The city had 91,867 people and Greater Victoria about 397,000 in 2021. The Lekwungen and other Coast Salish peoples lived here long before British settlement began in 1843. The city's best-known buildings, the Parliament Buildings (1897) and the Empress Hotel (1908), face the harbour, and its Chinatown is the second oldest in North America. Tourism matters, but its largest private industry by revenue is now technology. Just to the west, CFB Esquimalt covers about 41 km² and is the Royal Canadian Navy's Pacific base. Its dockyard was the base of the Royal Navy's Pacific Station until 1911, and in 2018 it employed 4,411 military personnel and 2,762 civilians.
The two shores are tied together by boat. The MV Coho, owned by the Black Ball Line, has sailed between Port Angeles and Victoria since 29 December 1959. The 37 km crossing takes about 90 minutes and runs through the strait's eastern entrance, where the Race Rocks archipelago sits in a high-current zone halfway between the two ports. The ferry makes two to four round trips a day depending on the season, and in 2018 the ferry carried 475,000 passengers and 130,000 vehicles. The Victoria Clipper runs passenger service from Seattle, and a seasonal Washington State Ferries route links Sidney to Anacortes. On 23 August 1956 the Canadian swimmer Marilyn Bell swam the same Port Angeles to Victoria route. A cairn near Beacon Hill Park marks where she came ashore.
The water between them supports another livelihood: whale watching. The southern resident orcas, which feed on spawning Chinook salmon in the strait and nearby waters, have been listed as endangered in the United States since 2005. The Center for Whale Research's census of 1 July 2024 counted only 73 of them. Transient orcas hunt sea lions and gray whales in the same waters.
Spanish expeditions under Manuel Quimper, Francisco de Eliza and others charted the strait in detail between 1789 and 1791, before British and American settlers arrived. Today the border down the middle of the strait is settled, but the line running 200 nautical miles out to sea from its mouth is not. Canada and the United States both propose an equidistant line, but they draw it from slightly different base points. British Columbia instead argues for following the Juan de Fuca Canyon. The names are settled, though. In 2009 the naming boards of both countries adopted "Salish Sea" for the strait, the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound together, with the United States Board on Geographic Names approving it on 12 November.
For the landscape behind the southern shore, see our guide to the Olympic Peninsula's geography, which covers the mountains that create Sequim's dry weather. The wider frontier the strait belongs to is covered in our article on the US–Canada border.