Brunswick is a city in and the county seat of Glynn County, Georgia, United States. As the major urban and economic center of the state's lower southeast, it is the second-largest urban area on the Georgia coast after Savannah and contains the Brunswick Old Town Historic District.
British colonists settled the peninsula in 1738 as a buffer to Spanish Florida. It came under provincial control in 1771 and was founded as "Brunswick" after the German duchy of Brunswick–Lüneburg, the ancestral home of the House of Hanover. It was incorporated as a city in 1856. Throughout its history, Brunswick has served as an important port city: in World War II, it served as a strategic military location with an operational base for escort blimps and a shipbuilding facility for the U.S. Maritime Commission.
Brunswick supports a progressive economy largely based on tourism and logistics, with a metropolitan GDP of $3.9 billion. The Port of Brunswick handles approximately 10 percent of all U.S. roll-on/roll-off trade—third in the U.S., behind the ports of Los Angeles and Newark. The headquarters of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is located 5 miles (8 km) north of the central business district of the city and is adjacent to Brunswick Golden Isles Airport, which provides commercial air service to the area. In the 2010 U.S. census, the population of the city proper was 15,383; the urban area, 51,024; and the metropolitan area, 112,370.
Brunswick is located on a harbor of the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 40 mi (60 km) north of Florida and 80 mi (130 km) south of South Carolina. Brunswick is bordered on the west by Oglethorpe Bay, the East River, and the Turtle River. It is bordered on the south by the Brunswick River and on the east by the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway in the Mackay River, which separates it from the Golden Isles.