Spallumcheen

Spallumcheen is a district municipality in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Located in the Okanagan region between Vernon and Enderby, the township had a population of 5,055 and land area of in the Canada 2011 Census. The district, whose official name is the Township of Spallumcheen and which is the oldest rural municipality in the British Columbia Interior, consists primarily of agricultural land surrounding the separately incorporated City of Armstrong. Both Spallumcheen and Armstrong are member municipalities of the Regional District of North Okanagan.

Etymology

The name is derived from a Shuswap language word, either "spil-a-mi-shine" meaning "flat mouth", or "spal-lum-shin" meaning "meadow flat". Another word, spalmtsin, which has an Okanagan language cognate spelemtsin, means "flat area along edge". Other variations include Spellmacheen and Spallamcheen, which were the original names used for the Shuswap River, which exits the Shuswap Highland in this area and heads north to Mara and Shuswap Lakes. The same word is the source of the name of the Spillimacheen River and the settlement of the same name in the Columbia Valley.

In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Spallumcheen had a population of 5,307 living in 2,036 of its 2,099 total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of 5,106. With a land area of, it had a population density of in 2021.

According to the 2021 census, religious groups in Spallumcheen included: