page_title: Rural Municipality of Gimli
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Rural Municipality of Gimli / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The Gimli viking statue was originally erected in 1967 by the Gimli Chamber of Commerce and unveiled then by Iceland's president. The site was then re-landscaped in 2017, Canada's 150th year.
context_page_description: Gimli is a rural municipality located in the Interlake Region of south-central Manitoba, Canada, on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg. It is about 75 kilometres north of the provincial capital Winnipeg. The rural municipality's population in the Canada 2016 Census was 6,181, making it the 12th largest rural municipality by population. The RM of Gimli has an area of 318.75 square kilometres, making it the sixth smallest rural municipality by area.
  The community of Gimli and the surrounding district were once an Icelandic ethnic block settlement, and the area, known as New Iceland, is home to the largest concentration of people of Icelandic ancestry outside Iceland. It also has significant Ukrainian and German communities, at 12% and 6% respectively.
  The Town of Winnipeg Beach lies adjacent to its southeast corner, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, between it and the Rural Municipality of St. Andrews to the south.
context_section_description: The Rural Municipality of Gimli was first settled by a large group of Icelandic settlers who arrived in New Iceland on Lake Winnipeg in the 1870s.  Other settlements established beyond the community of Gimli with further fisheries based settlements at Arnes, Hnausa, Beyond the borders of Manitoba as it was then, this settlement fell within the District of Keewatin, until 1881 when Manitoba was enlarged. In 1897, the Gimli area was opened up to homesteaders and saw a surge of settlers from Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Germany.  Originally organized as a self-administering "Icelandic reserve" directly responsible to Ottawa, the settlers of New Iceland developed a unique constitution of by-laws for local government which remained in effect until 1887. The initial status of New Iceland as a "reserve" remained in effect until 1899.
  In the Gimli Glider incident on 23 July 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 en route from Montreal to Edmonton ran out of fuel and made an unpowered landing on a decommissioned runway (converted to a drag strip) at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former RCAF base near Gimli with no control tower and no fire trucks available. A reenactment of the incident aired on Discovery Channel's Mayday series and on Syfy's Urban Legends series.
  The Town of Gimli amalgamated with the Rural Municipality of Gimli on January 1, 2003.
caption: Gimli Viking statue commemorating Icelandic heritage. The statue was built in 1967 and unveiled by the President of Iceland in the same year. The statue site was then upgraded in 2017, Canada's sesquicentennial year.
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