The city lies at the confluence of the Belaya and Ufa rivers, in the centre-north of Bashkortostan, on hills forming the Ufa Plateau to the west of the southern Ural Mountains, with a population of over 1.1 million residents,[14] up to 1.4 million residents in the urban agglomeration.

The city hosted separate summits of the BRICS group as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2015.

The Russian linguist Aleksandr Matveyev proposes that the name is of Iranian origin, from "ap", meaning water.

According to them, this settlement was founded by Turkic-speaking tribes to perform rituals and sacrifices to the sky god Tengri, and they called this place Upe or Ufe because, they argue, in ancient Turkic languages a place of ritual sacrifice used to be called an "opo" or an "ope."

French orientalist Henri Cordier associates the position of Pascherti with the current location of Ufa.

[24] The official of the Orenburg Governorate government Vasily Rebelensky wrote that Ufa was founded by the Bashkirs.

[25] By order of Ivan the Terrible a fortress was built on the site of modern Ufa in 1574,[26] and originally bore the name of the hill it stood on, Tura-Tau.

[citation needed] During World War II, following eastward Soviet retreat in 1941, the Abwehr operated in Ufa, 1941–1943,[28] some German infiltration, occurred 1914–1943 in espionage, many industrial enterprises of the western parts of the Soviet Union were evacuated to Ufa.

[1] As an administrative center, it is, together with twenty-four rural localities, incorporated separately as the city of republic significance of Ufa, an administrative unit with status equal to that of the districts, and is likewise home to a unit of Russia's Central Military District; the 12th Separate Guards Engineer Brigade.

[31] Many urban enterprises engaged in oil refining, chemistry, and mechanical engineering reside in Ufa.

On May 30, 1996, there was a ceremony marking the beginning of preparatory construction work, attended by then-President Boris Yeltsin.

[36] Public transportation in Ufa includes trams (since 1937) and trolleybuses (since 1962), as well as bus and marshrutka (routed cabs) lines.

They are housed in good-quality buildings, but they do not benefit from them to society, more and more often, rumors are circulating about them that they are designed for siphoning money – since there are practically no budget places for economic specialties in Ufa.

Not all these reports are groundless, and the culprits are getting out of responsibility due to the fact that there is no Continuous Emission Control System (CEMS) in the city.

20-18 / 218 of 11.07.18: "In the framework of solving problems at the federal level in the implementation of the state monitoring of atmospheric air, the territorial office of Roshydromet – FGBU Bashkir UGMS monitors pollution of atmospheric air in Ufa at nine stationary posts of the state observation network located in different parts of the city to estimate the level of air pollution generated by the total release and stationary and mobile sources of pollutants.

During 2017 almost all posts of the state observation network recorded exceedances of a single concentration of suspended substances.

At the same time, in order to implement regional state environmental oversight aimed at preventing, detecting, and suppressing violations by public authorities, local authorities, and legal entities, individual entrepreneurs and citizens of requirements in the field of atmospheric air protection, under the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment of the Republic Bashkortostan operates the State Bank of the Republic of Belarus "Office of State Analytical Control," to whose tasks, including GSI "organization of periodic environmental monitoring mobile laboratories in the areas where the population lives in the republic and in the zones of protective measures in the system of the general program of integrated environmental and sanitary-hygienic monitoring."