Nomadic hunters are estimated to have arrived in Virginia around 17,000 years ago. Evidence from Daugherty's Cave shows it was regularly used as a rock shelter by 9,800 years ago. During the late Woodland period (500–1000 AD), tribes coalesced, and farming, first of corn and squash, began, with beans and tobacco arriving from the southwest and Mexico by the end of the period. Palisaded towns began to be built around 1200. The native population in the current boundaries of Virginia reached around 50,000 in the 1500s. Large groups in the area at that time included the Algonquian in the Tidewater region, which they referred to as Tsenacommacah, the Iroquoian-speaking Nottoway and Meherrin to the north and south, and the Tutelo, who spoke Siouan, to the west. Powhatan controlled more than 150 settlements that had a total population of around 15,000 in 1607. Three-fourths of the native population in Virginia, however, died from smallpox and other Old World diseases during that century, disrupting their oral traditions and complicating research into earlier periods. Additionally, many primary sources, including those that mention Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, were created by Europeans, who may have held biases or misunderstood native social structures and customs.
Colony
Several European expeditions, including a group of Spanish Jesuits, explored the Chesapeake Bay during the 16th century. To help counter Spain's colonies in the Caribbean, Queen Elizabeth I of England supported Walter Raleigh's 1584 expedition to the Atlantic coast of North America. The name "Virginia" was used by Captain Arthur Barlowe in the expedition's report, and may have been suggested by Raleigh or Elizabeth (perhaps noting her status as the "Virgin Queen" or that they viewed the land as being untouched) or related to an Algonquin phrase, Wingandacoa or Windgancon, or leader's name, Wingina, as heard by the expedition. The name initially applied to the entire coastal region from South Carolina in the south to Maine in the north, along with the island of Bermuda. Raleigh's colony failed, but the potential financial and strategic gains still captivated many English policymakers. In 1606, King James I issued a charter for a new colony to the Virginia Company of London. The group financed an expedition under Christopher Newport that established a settlement named Jamestown in 1607.
Though more settlers soon joined, many were ill-prepared for the dangers of the new settlement. As the colony's president, John Smith secured food for the colonists from nearby tribes, but after he left in 1609, this trade stopped and a series of ambush-style killings between colonists and natives under Chief Powhatan and his brother began, resulting in mass starvation in the colony that winter. By the end of the colony's first 14 years, over 80% of the roughly eight thousand settlers transported there had died. Demand for exported tobacco, however, fueled the need for more workers. Starting in 1618, the headright system tried to solve this by granting colonists farmland for their help attracting indentured servants. Enslaved Africans were first sold in Virginia in 1619. Though other Africans arrived as indentured servants and could be freed after four to seven years, the basis for lifelong slavery was developed in legal cases like those of John Punch in 1640 and John Casor in 1655. Laws passed in Jamestown defined slavery as race-based in 1661, as inherited maternally in 1662, and as enforceable by death in 1669.
thumb|left|In 1699, after the statehouse in [[Jamestown, Virginia|Jamestown was destroyed by fire, the Colony of Virginia's capitol was moved to Williamsburg, where the College of William & Mary was founded six years earlier.|alt=A three-story red brick colonial-style hall and its left and right wings during summer.]]
From the colony's start, residents agitated for greater local control, and in 1619, certain male colonists began electing representatives to an assembly, later called the House of Burgesses, that negotiated issues with the governing council appointed by the London Company. Unhappy with this arrangement, the monarchy revoked the company's charter and began directly naming governors and Council members in 1624. In 1635, colonists arrested a governor who ignored the assembly and sent him back to England against his will. William Berkeley was named governor in 1642, just as the turmoil of the English Civil War and Interregnum permitted the colony greater autonomy. As a supporter of the king, Berkeley welcomed other Cavaliers who fled to Virginia. He surrendered to Parliamentarians in 1652, but after the 1660 Restoration made him governor again, he blocked assembly elections and exacerbated the class divide by disenfranchising and restricting the movement of indentured servants, who made up around 80 percent of the workforce. On the colony's frontier, tribes like the Tutelo and Doeg were being squeezed by Seneca raiders from the north, leading to more confrontations with colonists. In 1676, several hundred working-class followers of Nathaniel Bacon, upset by Berkeley's refusal to retaliate against the tribes, burned Jamestown.
Bacon's Rebellion forced the signing of Bacon's Laws, which restored some of the colony's rights and sanctioned both attacks on native tribes and the enslavement of their people. The Treaty of 1677 further reduced the independence of the tribes that signed it, and aided the colony's assimilation of their land in the years that followed. Colonists in the 1700s were pushing westward into the area held by the Seneca and their larger Iroquois Nation, and in 1748, a group of wealthy speculators, backed by the British monarchy, formed the Ohio Company to start English settlement and trade in the Ohio Country west of the Appalachian Mountains. France, which claimed this area as part of New France, viewed this as a threat, and in 1754 the French and Indian War engulfed England, France, the Iroquois, and other allied tribes on both sides. A militia from several British colonies, called the Virginia Regiment, was led by Major George Washington, himself one of the investors in the Ohio Company.
Statehood
In the decade following the French and Indian War, the British Parliament passed new taxes which were deeply unpopular in the colonies. In the House of Burgesses, opposition to taxation without representation was led by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, among others. Virginians began to coordinate their actions with other colonies in 1773 and sent delegates to the Continental Congress the following year. After the House of Burgesses was dissolved in 1774 by the royal governor, Virginia's revolutionary leaders continued to govern via the Virginia Conventions. On May 15, 1776, the Convention declared Virginia's independence and adopted George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was then included in a new constitution that designated Virginia as a commonwealth. Another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, drew upon Mason's work in drafting the national Declaration of Independence.
After the American Revolutionary War began, George Washington was selected by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to head the Continental Army, and many Virginians joined the army and revolutionary militias. Virginia was the first colony to ratify the Articles of Confederation in December 1777. In April 1780, the capital was moved to Richmond at the urging of Governor Thomas Jefferson, who feared that Williamsburg's coastal location would make it vulnerable to British attack. In January 1781, Benedict Arnold's British forces raided Richmond before establishing a base at Portsmouth. The British army had over seven thousand soldiers and twenty-five warships stationed in Virginia at the beginning of 1781, but General Charles Cornwallis and his superiors were indecisive, and maneuvers by the three thousand soldiers under the Marquis de Lafayette and twenty-nine allied French warships together managed to confine the British to a swampy area of the Virginia Peninsula in September. Around 16,000 soldiers under George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau quickly converged there and defeated Cornwallis in the siege of Yorktown. His surrender on October 19, 1781, led to peace negotiations in Paris and secured the independence of the colonies.
Virginians were instrumental in writing the United States Constitution. James Madison drafted the Virginia Plan in 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1789,|alt=A family of eight women and children sit on a bench behind a cylindrical metal heater, while one adult male sits on his own to the right.]]
Between 1790 and 1860, the number of slaves in Virginia rose from around 290,000 to over 490,000, roughly one-third of the state population, and the number of slave owners rose to over 50,000. Both of these numbers represented the most in the U.S. The boom in Southern cotton production using cotton gins to harvest upland cotton increased the amount of labor needed, but new federal laws prohibited the importation of slaves. Decades of monoculture tobacco farming had also degraded Virginia's agricultural productivity.
On October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to start a slave revolt across the southern states. The polarized national response to his raid, capture, trial, and execution that December marked a tipping point for many who believed slavery would need to be ended by force. Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election further convinced many southern supporters of slavery that his opposition to its expansion would ultimately mean the end of slavery across the country. The seizure of Fort Sumter by Confederate forces on April 14, 1861, prompted Lincoln to call for the federalization of 75,000 militiamen.
thumb|left|The [[Confederate States of America|Confederacy used Richmond as their capital from May 1861 till April 1865, when they abandoned the city and set fire to its downtown.|alt=A color drawing of a city skyline in flames as a steady stream of people on horses or in horse-drawn carriages cross a long bridge over a river.]]
The Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 voted on April 17 to secede on the condition it was approved in a referendum the next month. The convention voted to join the Confederacy, which named Richmond its capital on May 20. During the May 23 referendum, armed pro-Confederate groups prevented the casting and counting of votes from areas that opposed secession. Representatives from 27 of these northwestern counties instead began the Wheeling Convention, which organized a government loyal to the Union and led to the separation of West Virginia as a new state.
The armies of the Union and Confederacy first met on July 21, 1861, at Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia, a bloody Confederate victory. Union General George B. McClellan organized the Army of the Potomac, which landed on the Virginia Peninsula in March 1862 and reached the outskirts of Richmond that June. With Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston wounded in fighting outside the city, command of his Army of Northern Virginia fell to Robert E. Lee. Over the next month, Lee drove the Union army back, and starting that September led the first of several invasions into Union territory. During the next three years of war, more battles were fought in Virginia than anywhere else, including the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and the concluding Battle of Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865.
Reconstruction and segregation
thumb|With nearly 800,000 American soldiers passing through its terminals, the [[Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation at Newport News became the second-largest U.S. port of embarkation during World War I.|alt=Several World War I ships line a port crowded with warehouses, with a city skyline behind them.]]
Virginia was formally restored to the United States in 1870, due to the work of the Committee of Nine. During the post-war Reconstruction era, African Americans were able to unite in communities, particularly around Richmond, Danville, and the Tidewater region, and take a greater role in Virginia society; many achieved some land ownership during the 1870s. Virginia adopted a constitution in 1868 which guaranteed political, civil, and voting rights, and provided for free public schools. However, with many railroad lines and other infrastructure destroyed during the Civil War, the Commonwealth was deeply in debt, and in the late 1870s redirected money from public schools to pay bondholders. The Readjuster Party formed in 1877 and won legislative power in 1879 by uniting Black and white Virginians behind a shared opposition to debt payments and the perceived plantation elites.
The Readjusters focused on building up schools, like Virginia Tech and Virginia State, and successfully forced West Virginia to share in the pre-war debt. But in 1883, they were divided by a proposed repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, and days before that year's election, a riot in Danville, involving armed policemen, left four Black men and one white man dead. These events motivated a push by white supremacists to seize political power through voter suppression, and segregationists in the Democratic Party won the legislature that year and maintained control for decades. They passed Jim Crow laws that established a racially segregated society, and in 1902 rewrote the state constitution to include a poll tax and other voter registration measures that effectively disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites.
New economic forces meanwhile industrialized the Commonwealth. Virginian James Albert Bonsack invented the tobacco cigarette rolling machine in 1880 leading to new large-scale production centered around Richmond. Railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington founded Newport News Shipbuilding in 1886, which was responsible for building 38 warships for the U.S. Navy between 1907 and 1923. During World War I, German submarines attacked ships outside the port, which was a major site for transportation of soldiers and supplies. The shipyard continued building warships in World War II, and quadrupled its pre-war labor force to 70,000 by 1943. The Radford Arsenal outside Blacksburg also employed 22,000 workers making explosives, while the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria had over 5,050.
Civil rights to present
thumb|Protests in 2020 focused on [[List of Confederate monuments and memorials in Virginia|Confederate monuments in the state.|alt=A bronze statue of a man riding a horse on a tall pedestal that is covered in colorful graffiti.]]
High-school student Barbara Rose Johns started a strike in 1951 at her underfunded and segregated school in Prince Edward County. The protests led Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill to file a lawsuit against the county. Their case joined Brown v. Board of Education at the Supreme Court, which rejected the doctrine of "separate but equal" in 1954. The segregationist establishment, led by Senator Harry F. Byrd and his Byrd Organization, reacted with a strategy called "massive resistance", and the General Assembly passed a package of laws in 1956 that cut off funding to local schools that desegregated, causing some to close. Courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional, and on February 2, 1959, Black students integrated schools in Arlington and Norfolk, where they were known as the Norfolk 17. Rather than integrate, county leaders in Prince Edward shut their school system in June 1959. When litigation again reached the Supreme Court, it ordered the county to reopen and integrate its schools, which finally happened in September 1964.
Federal passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), and their later enforcement by the Justice Department, helped end racial segregation in Virginia and overturn Jim Crow laws. In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on interracial marriage with Loving v. Virginia. In 1968, Governor Mills Godwin called a commission to rewrite the state constitution. The new constitution, which banned discrimination and removed articles that now violated federal law, passed in a referendum and went into effect in 1971. In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African American elected as governor in the United States, and in 1992, Bobby Scott became the first Black congressman from Virginia since 1888.
The expansion of federal government offices into Northern Virginia's suburbs during the Cold War boosted the region's population and economy. The Central Intelligence Agency outgrew their offices in Foggy Bottom during the Korean War, and moved to Langley in 1961, in part due to a decision by the National Security Council that the agency relocate outside the District of Columbia. The Pentagon, built in Arlington during World War II as the headquarters of the Department of Defense, was struck by a hijacked plane in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and in Virginia Beach in 2019 led to passage of gun control measures in 2020. Racial injustice and the presence of Confederate monuments in Virginia have also led to large demonstrations, including in August 2017, when a white supremacist drove his car into protesters, killing one, and in June 2020, when protests that were part of the larger Black Lives Matter movement brought about the removal of Confederate statues.
Geography
thumb|upright=1.2|Virginia is shaped by the [[Blue Ridge Mountains, the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed, and the parallel 36°30′ north.|alt=A topographic map of Virginia, with text identifying cities and natural features.]]
Virginia is located in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States. Virginia has a total area of , including of water, making it the 35th-largest state by area. It is bordered by Maryland and Washington, D.C. to the northeast; by the Atlantic Ocean to the east; by North Carolina to the south; by Tennessee to the southwest; by Kentucky to the west; and by West Virginia to the northwest. Virginia's boundary with Maryland and Washington, D.C., the low-water mark of the south shore of the Potomac River, has been an issue for water rights.
Virginia's southern border was defined in 1665 as 36°30' north latitude. Surveyors marking the border with North Carolina in the 18th century however started about to the north and drifted an additional 3.5 miles by the border's westernmost point. After Tennessee joined the U.S. in 1796, new surveyors worked in 1802 and 1803 to reset their border with Virginia as a line from the summit of White Top Mountain to the top of Tri-State Peak in the Cumberland Mountains. However, deviations in that border were identified when it was re-marked in 1856, and the Virginia General Assembly proposed a new surveying commission in 1871. Representatives from Tennessee preferred to keep the less-straight 1803 line, and in 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for them against Virginia. One result is how the city of Bristol is divided in two between the states.
Geology and terrain
thumb|upright=0.75|[[Great Falls (Potomac River)|Great Falls is on the fall line of the Potomac River, and its rocks date to the late Precambrian.|alt=Rapids in a wide, rocky river under blue sky with clouds colored purple by the sunset.]]
The Chesapeake Bay separates the contiguous portion of the Commonwealth from the two-county peninsula of Virginia's Eastern Shore. The bay was formed from the drowned river valley of the ancient Susquehanna River. Many of Virginia's rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay, including the Potomac, Rappahannock, York, and James, which create three peninsulas in the bay, traditionally referred to as "necks" named Northern Neck, Middle Peninsula, and the Virginia Peninsula from north to south. Sea level rise has eroded the land on Virginia's islands, which include Tangier Island in the bay and Chincoteague, one of 23 barrier islands on the Atlantic coast.
The Tidewater is a coastal plain between the Atlantic coast and the fall line. It includes the Eastern Shore and major estuaries of Chesapeake Bay. The Piedmont is a series of sedimentary and igneous rock-based foothills east of the mountains. The region, known for its heavy clay soil, includes the Southwest Mountains around Charlottesville. The Blue Ridge Mountains are a physiographic province of the Appalachian Mountains with the highest points in the Commonwealth, the tallest being Mount Rogers at . The Ridge-and-Valley region is west of the mountains, carbonate rock based, and includes the Massanutten Mountain ridge and the Great Appalachian Valley, which is called the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, named after the river of the same name that flows through it. The Cumberland Plateau and Cumberland Mountains are in the southwest corner of Virginia, south of the Allegheny Plateau. In this region, rivers flow northwest into the Ohio River basin.
Virginia's seismic zones have not had a history of regular earthquake activity. Earthquakes are rarely above 4.5 in magnitude. The Commonwealth's largest earthquake in at least a century, at a magnitude of 5.8, struck central Virginia on August 23, 2011. 35million years ago, a bolide impacted what is now eastern Virginia. The resulting Chesapeake Bay impact crater may explain what earthquakes and subsidence the region does experience. A meteor impact is also theorized as the source of Lake Drummond, the largest of the two natural lakes in the state.
The Commonwealth's carbonate rock is filled with more than 4,000 limestone caves, ten of which are open for tourism, including the popular Luray Caverns and Skyline Caverns. Virginia's iconic Natural Bridge is the remaining roof of a collapsed limestone cave. Coal mining takes place in the three mountainous regions. More than 72million tons of other non-fuel resources, such as slate, kyanite, sand, or gravel, were mined in Virginia . The largest known deposits of uranium in the U.S. are under Coles Hill, Virginia. Despite a challenge that reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice, the state has banned its mining since 1982 due to environmental and public health concerns.
Climate
Virginia has a humid subtropical climate that transitions to humid continental west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Seasonal extremes vary from average lows of in January to average highs of in July. with the Shenandoah Valley being the state's driest region. These months are also the most common for tornadoes, six of which touched down in the Commonwealth in 2025. Hurricanes and tropical storms can occur from August to October. The deadliest natural disaster in Virginia was Hurricane Camille, which killed over 150 people in 1969 mainly in inland Nelson County. Between December and March, cold-air damming caused by the Appalachian Mountains can lead to significant snowfalls across the state, such as the January 2016 blizzard, which created the state's highest recorded one-day snowfall of near Bluemont. On average, cities in Virginia can receive between of snow annually, but recent winters have seen below-average snowfalls, and much of Virginia had no measurable snow during the 2022–2023 winter season.
Climate change in Virginia is leading to higher temperatures year-round as well as more heavy rain and flooding events. Urban heat islands can be found in many Virginia cities and suburbs, particularly in neighborhoods linked to historic redlining. The air in Virginia has statistically improved since 1998. The closure and conversion of coal power plants in Virginia and the Ohio Valley region has helped cut the amount of particulate matter in Virginia's air in half. Current plans call for 30% of the Commonwealth's electricity to be renewable by 2030 and for all to be carbon-free by 2050.
Ecosystem
thumb|Up to 7,000 [[white-tailed deer, also known as Virginia deer, live in Shenandoah National Park.|alt=A red-brown colored deer with antlers stands in a meadow with high grasses.]]
Forests cover 62% of Virginia , of which 80% is considered hardwood forest, meaning that trees are primarily deciduous and broad-leaved. The other 20% is pine, with loblolly and shortleaf pine dominating much of central and eastern Virginia. In the western and mountainous parts of the Commonwealth, oak and hickory are most common, while lower altitudes are more likely to have small but dense stands of hemlocks and mosses in abundance. Spongy moth infestations in oak trees and the blight in chestnut trees have decreased both of their numbers, leaving more room for hickory and the invasive tree of heaven. Plants like milkweed, dandelions, daisies, ferns, and Virginia creeper, which is featured on the state flag, are also common. The Thompson Wildlife Area in Fauquier is known for having one of the largest populations of trillium wildflowers in North America. Native carnivorans include black bears, who have a population of around five to six thousand in the state, as well as bobcats, coyotes, both gray and red foxes, raccoons, weasels and skunks. Rodents include groundhogs, nutria, beavers, both gray squirrels and fox squirrels, chipmunks, and Allegheny woodrats, while the 17 bat species include brown bats and the Virginia big-eared bat, the state mammal. and the native Appalachian cottontail was recognized in 1992 as a distinct species of rabbit, one of three found in the state. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises have been recorded in Virginia's coastal waters, with bottlenose dolphins being the most frequent aquatic mammals. Water birds include sandpipers, wood ducks, and Virginia rail, while common inland examples include warblers, woodpeckers, and cardinals, the state bird. Birds of prey include osprey, broad-winged hawks, and barred owls. There are no endemic bird species. Peregrine falcons, whose numbers dramatically declined due to DDT poisoning in the middle of the 20th century, are the focus of conservation efforts in the state and a reintroduction program in Shenandoah National Park.
Virginia has 226 species of freshwater fish from 25 families, a diversity attributable to the area's varied and humid climate, topography, interconnected river system, and lack of Pleistocene glaciers. Common examples on the Cumberland Plateau and higher-elevation regions include Eastern blacknose dace, sculpin, smallmouth bass, redhorse sucker, Kanawha darter, and brook trout, the state fish. Downhill in the Piedmont, stripeback darter and Roanoke bass become common, as do swampfish, bluespotted sunfish, and pirate perch in the Tidewater. The Chesapeake Bay hosts clams, oysters, and 350 species of saltwater and estuarine fish, including the bay's most abundant finfish, the Bay anchovy, as well as the invasive blue catfish. An estimated 238 million Chesapeake blue crabs live in the bay . There are 34 native species of crayfish, like the Big Sandy. while the northern watersnake is the most common of the 32 snake species.
Protected lands
thumb|[[Oak trees produce a haze of isoprene, which helps give the Blue Ridge Mountains their signature color.|alt=Five mountain ridges in shades of dark blue below an orange and yellow sunset.]]
, roughly 17.1% of land in the Commonwealth is protected by federal, state, and local governments and non-profits. Federal lands account for the majority, with 30 National Park Service units, such as Great Falls Park and the Appalachian Trail, and one national park, Shenandoah. Almost 40 percent of Shenandoah's total area has been designated as wilderness under the National Wilderness Preservation System. The U.S. Forest Service administers the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, which cover more than within Virginia's mountains, and continue into West Virginia and Kentucky. The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge also extends into North Carolina, as does the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, which marks the beginning of the Outer Banks.
State agencies control about one-third of protected land in the state, Breaks Interstate Park crosses the Kentucky border and is one of only two inter-state parks in the United States. Sustainable logging is allowed in 26 state forests managed by the Virginia Department of Forestry totaling , as is hunting in 44 Wildlife Management Areas run by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources covering over . The Chesapeake Bay is not a national park, but is protected by both state and federal legislation and the inter-state Chesapeake Bay Program.
Cities and towns
thumb|upright=1.35|The population density of Virginia counties and cities as of 2020|alt=Map of Virginia counties colored by population density, ranging from pale yellow, to green, to dark blue.
Virginia is divided into 95counties and 38independent cities, which the U.S. Census Bureau describes as county-equivalents. This general method of treating cities and counties on par with each other is unique to Virginia and stretches back to the influence of Williamsburg and Norfolk in the colonial period. Only three other independent cities exist elsewhere in the US. The differences between counties and cities in Virginia are small and have to do with how each assess new taxes, whether a referendum is necessary to issue bonds, and with the application of Dillon's Rule, which limits the authority of cities and counties to countermand acts expressly allowed by the General Assembly. Counties can also have incorporated towns, and while there are no further administrative subdivisions, the Census Bureau recognizes several hundred unincorporated communities.
thumb|[[Arlington County, Virginia|Arlington County in Northern Virginia was once part of Washington, D.C.|alt=An aerial view of several tall glassy office buildings.]]
Over three million people, 35% of Virginians, live in the 20 jurisdictions collectively defined as Northern Virginia, part of the larger Washington metropolitan area and the Northeast megalopolis. Fairfax County, with more than 1.1million residents, is Virginia's most populous jurisdiction, and has a major urban business and shopping center in Tysons, Virginia's largest office market. Neighboring Prince William County, with over 450,000 residents, is Virginia's second-most populous county and home to Marine Corps Base Quantico, the FBI Academy, and Manassas National Battlefield Park. Arlington County is the smallest self-governing county in the U.S. by land area, and local politicians have proposed reorganizing it as an independent city due to its high density. In western Virginia, Roanoke city and Montgomery County, part of the Blacksburg–Christiansburg metropolitan area, both have surpassed a population of 100,000 since 2018.
On the western edge of the Tidewater region is Virginia's capital, Richmond, which has a population of around 230,000 in its city proper and over 1.3million in its metropolitan area. On the eastern edge is the Hampton Roads metropolitan area, where over 1.7million reside across six counties and nine cities, including the Commonwealth's three most populous independent cities: Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, and Norfolk. Neighboring Suffolk, which includes a portion of the Great Dismal Swamp, is the largest city by area at . One reason for the concentration of independent cities in the Tidewater region is that several rural counties there re-incorporated as cities or consolidated with existing cities to try to hold on to their new suburban neighborhoods that started booming in the 1950s, since cities like Norfolk and Portsmouth were able to annex land from adjoining counties until a moratorium in 1987. Others, like Poquoson, became cities to try to preserve racial segregation during the desegregation era of the 1970s.