Queens County, Prince Edward Island
Queens County is a county in the province of Prince Edward Island, Canada. It is the largest county in the province by population with 89,770 (2021) and land. Charlottetown is the county seat of Queens County, and is the largest city and the capital of Prince Edward Island. The county is located in the centre of Prince Edward Island, and the geography varies from relatively flat plains to rolling hills in the central interior lands known as the Bonshaw Hills. The coastline features sandstone cliffs and sandy beaches, with numerous sheltered bays on the Gulf  of St. Lawrence and Northumberland Strait. The most important geographic feature of Queens County is the Hillsborough River and its extensive estuary, which almost cuts both the county and Prince Edward Island in half. Queens County was formed in 1765, and was named by Captain Samuel Holland in honour of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, then queen consort of the United Kingdom. Historically the economy of the county has been primarily agricultural, similar to rest of Prince Edward Island. Today, the county is characterised by urban sprawl extending from Charlottetown in the centre of the county is the region's most  dominant feature; many rural parts of the county within the Charlottetown census agglomeration, and outside, are facing increased pressures to subdivide and develop into suburbs and exurbs. Stratford, a suburb of Charlottetown located south-east across the Hillsborough River, is the third-largest community in Prince Edward Island. Queens County is the only county in Prince Edward Island to have experienced population growth since 2011, with a change of +5.3% from 77,866 recorded in the Canada 2011 Census. Demographics. As a census division in the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Queens County had a population of living  in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of . With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021.