Toledo is the fourth largest city in the state of Ohio, with 287,208 inhabitants. It is known by the history of its industry as the "City of Glass". The Jeep has been manufactured there since 1941. Toledo is also known as the car accessories capital of the world. It made the world's first twinning with Toledo, Spain... on the southern shore of Lake Erie, at the south-western end of this very dense urban fringe that now runs from Rochester to the Detroit area, the conurbation of Toledo (653,695 inhab. in 2006, of which nearly 300,000 in the city itself), in the State of Ohio, was born and developed, like most neighbouring cities, from the port function. Its contact site, combined today with a vital border position (its economic relations with Canada and especially with the industrial centres of Ontario are numerous), enabled it to receive, process and export, by the royal route of the St. Lawrence, coal products from the Northern Appalachians and the "inland provinces" (Indiana-Ohio). But this large coal port, in order to absorb the serious after-effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s, gradually abandoned the basic industries in favour of developing and diversifying the range of its capital goods and processing industries: the range of its products, made in a real string of ginned establishments along the banks of the Maumee River (where in 1889 the first factory, that of the car manufacturing firm Jeep, was set up), includes cement works, electronic and electrical equipment, plastic industries and various petrochemical products. The expansion of this last industrial branch was strongly favoured by the fact that Toledo, given its geographical position, is now at the arrival point of pipelines from the South and Centre-West; hence the establishment, within the agglomeration, of large refining complexes. At the same time, Toledo has maintained an original tradition by remaining the leading glass centre in the whole of the Union.