romantic edinburgh accommodation, holiday accommodation scotland, bed breakfast, tourist short breaks, guest house uk, booking, romantic edinburgh accommodation

Some have called Edinburgh the Athens of the North and Auld Greekie for its intellectual history, and for its topography, with the Old Town of Edinburgh performing a similar role to the Athenian Acropolis.

Edinburgh has also been known as Dunedin, deriving from the Scottish Gaelic, Důn Čideann. Dunedin, New Zealand, was originally called "New Edinburgh" and is still nicknamed the "Edinburgh of the South". The Scots poets Robert Burns and Robert Fergusson sometimes used the city's Latin name, Edina. Ben Jonson described it as Britain's other eye, and Sir Walter Scott referred to the city as yon Empress of the North.

Panorama was originally coined by the Irish painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh.

Like much of the rest of Scotland, Edinburgh has a temperate maritime climate, which is relatively mild despite its northerly latitude. Winters are especially mild, considering that Moscow and Labrador and Newfoundland lie on the same latitude, with daytime temperatures rarely falling below freezing. Summer temperatures are normally moderate, with daily upper maxima rarely exceeding 18 °C. The proximity of the city to the sea mitigates any large variations in temperature or extremes of climate. Given Edinburgh's position between the coast and hills, it is renowned as a windy city, with the prevailing wind direction coming from the south-west which is associated with warm, unstable air from the Gulf Stream that can give rise to rainfall - although considerably less than cities to the west, such as Glasgow. Indeed, Edinburgh receives a lower annual precipitation total than most UK cities outside the south-east of England. Winds from an easterly direction are usually drier but colder. Rainfall is distributed fairly evenly throughout the year. Vigorous Atlantic depressions - sometimes called European windstorms can affect the city between October and March.

As of 2006, the General Register Office for Scotland estimated that the City of Edinburgh council area had a resident population of 463,510. The 2001 UK census reported the population to be 448,624, making the city the seventh largest in the United Kingdom. The General Register Office also reported that this resident population was split between 220,094 males and 237,736 females.

Though Edinburgh's population is aging, a very large and transient population of young students studying at the city universities, has helped to offset this demographic problem. There are estimated to be around 100,000 students studying at the various institutions of higher education in the city.

The population of the greater Edinburgh area (including parts of Fife and the Scottish Borders) is 1.25 million and is projected to grow to 1.33 million by 2020. City of Edinburgh Council hopes this will continue to grow to 1.5 million by 2040, which is in line with the current average population of the three leading city regions in northern Europe: Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo.

Equally famous is the annual Hogmanay celebration. Originally simply a street party held on Princes Street and the Royal Mile, the Hogmanay event has been officially organised since 1993. In 1996, over 300,000 people attended, leading to ticketing of the main street party in later years, with a limit of 100,000 tickets. Hogmanay now covers four days of processions, concerts and fireworks, and the event regularly attracts thousands of people. On the night of 30 April, the Beltane Fire Festival takes place on Edinburgh's Calton Hill.