Wasaga Beach (or simply Wasaga) is a town in Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada. Situated along the longest freshwater beach in the world, it is a popular summer tourist destination. It is located along the southern end of Georgian Bay, approximately 150 km (93 mi) north of Toronto and about 40 km (25 mi) northwest of Barrie. To the west, Collingwood and The Blue Mountains also attract visitors much of the year. The town is situated along a very long sandy beach on Nottawasaga Bay in Georgian Bay and the winding Nottawasaga River. The beaches are part of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park; the park area totals 168 hectares (415 acres). Wasaga Beach has a year-round population of 24,862 as of 2021, but during the summer months the population increases with many seasonal residents.

The economy has struggled for some years, particularly since a major fire in late November 2007 destroyed many of the stores. It depends on tourists in an area where the primary shopping season is three to four months per year. In March 2017, the town passed its Downtown Development Master Plan, a 20-year strategy for significant redevelopment of the tourist area and adding a downtown to the business area. The goal is to improve tourism, diversify the economy, and get beyond its party town.

Wasaga Beach and the surrounding area was inhabited by the Huron-Wendat Nation for centuries before they were conquered and driven from their ancestral lands in 1649 by the Iroquois Haudenosaunee (Known as the Five Nation Iroquois Confederacy). Wasaga is a contraction of the Algonquin word Nottawasaga. Nottawa means Iroquois and saga means mouth of the river; the word “Nottawasaga” was used by Algonquin scouts as a warning if they saw Iroquois raiding parties approaching their villages.

In 1812 the United States declared war on Great Britain and invaded Upper Canada on several occasions. Wasaga Beach became a strategic location at the mouth of the Nottawasaga River leading to Fort Willow and the Nine Mile Portage which was part of the supply line for British forces in the War of 1812 to Fort Michilimackinac and points to the north and west. The Royal Navy schooner HMS Nancy was scuttled in the Nottawasaga River to prevent the Americans from capturing her and her stores.

Lumbering was the main industry for the remainder of the 19th century. Logs were floated downriver and into the bay, gathered at ports to feed local saw mills.

Because Wasaga Beach had sandy soil unsuitable for cultivation, it did not attract early European settlement. In the 1820s the first sign of settlement in the area began as John Goessman surveyed Flos Township. In 1826, land was being sold for four shillings an acre. Though unsuitable for farming, the Wasaga Beach area had an abundance of trees. In the late 1830s and throughout the rest of the century, the logging industry was key to the economy and integral to development of the area. The first permanent settler was John Van Vlack, who arrived in 1869 and founded a settlement on the south side of the Nottawasaga River near its mouth and named it after himself. In 1872, a wooden bridge, the Vanvlack Bridge, was constructed east of the present Main Street bridge to provide access to the beach, then used mainly as a road. The name Wasaga Beach was first used in the area in the late 19th Century.

A cottage, during England’s feudal period, was the holding by a cottager (known as a cotter or bordar) of a small house with enough garden to feed a family and in return for the cottage, the cottager had to provide some form of service to the manorial lord. However, in time cottage just became the general term for a small house. In modern usage, a cottage is usually a modest, often cosy dwelling, typically in a rural or semi-rural location and not necessarily in England. The cottage orné, often quite large and grand residences built by the nobility, dates back to a movement of “rustic” stylised cottages of the late 18th and early 19th century during the Romantic movement.

In British English the term now denotes a small, cozy dwelling of traditional build, although it can also be applied to modern construction designed to resemble traditional houses (“mock cottages”). Cottages may be detached houses, or terraced, such as those built to house workers in mining villages. The tied accommodation provided to farm workers was usually a cottage, see cottage garden. In England the term holiday cottage now denotes a specialised form of residential let property, attracting various tax benefits to the owner.

The holiday cottage exists in many cultures under different names. In Canadian English and American English, “cottage” is one term for such holiday homes, although they may also be called a “cabin”, “chalet”, or even “camp”. In Australia, the term “cabin” is common, cottage usually referring to a smaller pre-modern period dwelling. In certain countries (e.g. Nordics, Baltics, and Russia) the term “cottage” has local synonyms: In Finnish mökki, in Estonian suvila, in Latvian vasarnīca, in Livonian sõvvõkuodā, in Swedish stuga, in Norwegian hytte (from the German word Hütte), in Czech or Slovak chata or chalupa, in Russian дача (dacha).

In places such as Canada, “cottage” carries no connotations of size (compare with vicarage or hermitage).