Richmond serves as the state capital for the Commonwealth of Virginia and is America’s 16th-most highly populated state capital city. Virginia’s capital was named after an affluent suburban town just southeast of London in the United Kingdom.

Nicknames for Richmond include the River City for its proximity to the James River, Fist City for its reputation for violence, or simply the truncated abbreviation RVA. Popular monikers for Richmond are the Old Dominion and Mother of Presidents since many of America’s early presidents were native Virginians.

Richmond has many monuments and memorials notably along its Monument Avenue. Other examples are the Billy “Bojangles” Robinson monument, the 56-bell tower World Ware I Memorial Carillon, and the Virginia War Memorial.

Richmond is susceptible to flooding from the James River, typically caused by hurricanes and tropical storms. Damages to city property can also occur from snow and freezing rain in the winter, and also from severe thunderstorms and infrequent tornadoes during other seasons.

Research website numbeo lacks sufficient data to rank Virginia’s capital city on its comprehensive global quality of life rating which benchmarks 250 cities worldwide. Numbeo does evaluate Richmond on several individual factors. For instance, Richmond ranks well for traffic commute time (fastest 2%), property price to income ratio (lowest 15%) and pollution (cleanest 20%). On the negative side, Richmond rates relatively poorly for health care (worst score), safety (most dangerous 16%) and climate (bottom 43%).

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Guinness World Records documents Richmond’s In Your Ear Recording Studios as being the site where American Michael J. Stuart set the record for highest-pitched note ever whistled.

Richmond and its metropolitan area serves as headquarters for four mammoth corporations recognized as belonging to the Forbes Global 2000 world’s biggest companies. These gargantuan businesses are cigarette producer and marketer Altria Group; electric utility Dominion Energy; used-car retailer CarMax; and insurer Genworth Financial.

From an international trade perspective, Virginia exported US$17.915 billion worth of goods around the globe in 2019. Its most valuable exports include coal (11.2% of Virginia’s global total), electronic integrated circuit memories (3.9%), civilian aircraft including engines and other parts (3.4%), road tractors for semi-trailers (2.8%), soya beans (2.7%), printer and copier parts or accessories (2%), non-writing Kraft paper (1.5%), stemmed tobacco (1.3%), cellulose acetate artificial filament (1.2%), solid residues including soya bean oilcake (1.2%) according to United States Census Bureau data.

The non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for Richmond was 8.9% at July 2020, up from 3.1% one year earlier.

Capital Facts for Richmond, United States: Quick Reference

 
Richmonders celebrate Independence Day as a national holiday each July 4.

Richmond’s land area occupies 59.92 square miles (155.2 square kilometers). The state capital’s population was 232,055 Richmonders at September 21, 2020.

At the state level, Virginia covers a land area measuring 42,774.2 square miles (110,785.67 square kilometers) home to a population of 8.6 million dwellers.

Richmond’s population density is more concentrated, averaging 3,873 residents per square mile (1,495 per square kilometer).

Zooming out to Virginia’s state boundaries, population density dilutes to an average 202 inhabitants per square mile (78 per square kilometer).