Edinburgh. The Scottish Parliament sits at Holyrood and the Scottish Government works from St Andrew's House, both in Edinburgh. Glasgow is the larger city.
Edinburgh has been the capital of Scotland since the fifteenth century, and unlike most of the answers on this site, nothing about it is contested.
Glasgow is bigger: roughly 630,000 people to Edinburgh's 530,000 in the council areas, and much bigger again across the urban area. Size is not the test anywhere, and Scotland is one of many places where the largest city and the capital are different: so are Australia, Canada, Turkey and Brazil.
Scone, in Perthshire, was where Scottish kings were crowned, and Dunfermline, Stirling and Perth all served as royal seats. Edinburgh became the settled capital under James III in the 1450s, and the parliament met there from then until the union of 1707 dissolved it. It reconvened in 1999, after 292 years, a few hundred metres from where it had stopped.
The places above come from GeoNames, reconciled against Wikidata. Last checked 21 September 2026. How we know · Suggest a correction