Guelph is a city in South-western Ontario, Canada. Known as "The Royal City", Guelph is roughly 28 kilometres (17 mi) east of Waterloo and 100 kilometres (62 mi) west of downtown Toronto at the intersection of Highway 6 and Highway 7. It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it. Because of its low crime rates, clean environment and generally high standard of living, Guelph is consistently rated as one of the country's best places to live. Guelph has been noted as having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country throughout the 2008–2012 global recession, and has ranked at the bottom of Canada's crime severity list for the past five years.
The name Guelph comes from the Italian Guelfo and the Bavarian-Germanic Welf. It is a reference to the reigning British monarch at the time Guelph was founded, King George IV, whose family was from the House of Hanover, a younger branch of the House of Welf. "Guelph" is also said to be a tongue in cheek reference to the German population in neighbouring Berlin (Kitchener), asGuelphs was the name given to the northern Italian factions who opposed the reign of medieval Germany, (known as the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th to 16th centuries
