Montreal (Montréal) is unique in North America, blending a brash New World urbanity with the romantic charm of its European-flavoured historic districts and a Gallic sense of joie de vivre evident in the city’s many pavement cafes and dynamic nightlife.
Although its downtown skyscrapers are a testament to the economic clout of Canada’s second largest city, visitors are more likely to be drawn by the promise of a horse-drawn calèche ride along the cobbled streets of Old Montreal or a stroll up Mount Royal, the city’s landmark.
Montreal is situated on an island, 50km by 16km (31 miles by 10 miles), between the Rivière des Prairies and the St Lawrence River. ‘Discovered’ by Jacques Cartier in 1535, the island was already inhabited – the Iroquois village of Hochelaga stood at the foot of Mount Royal. By 1642, Hochelaga was abandoned in favour of the European settlement, Ville Marie.
A French colony until 1760, Montreal fell to the British, and today some 67% of the inhabitants claim French as a mother tongue, making Montréal the second most populous French-speaking city in the world after Paris.
Defying simple definition, Montreal’s character is rooted within the uneasy marriage of the founding French Catholic and English Protestant cultures yet derives its vitality from a cosmopolitan mix of immigrants from around the globe.
The charming buildings of Old Montreal, are today filled with boutiques, bars, hotels and restaurants and from the promenade along the adjacent Old Port one sees the nearby islands of Ile Ste-Hélène and Ile Notre-Dame, site of the Expo 67 World Fair, and now comprising the city’s largest park, Parc Jean-Drapeau. The world’s tallest inclined tower can be visited atop the Olympic Stadium, a legacy of the 1976 Summer Olympics, and next door is the city’s expansive Botanical Garden.
The ‘real’ Montreal, though, exists in its neighbourhoods – like Little Italy and Chinatown and especially the multicultural Mile End and Plateau Mont-Royal. Boulevard St-Laurent (‘The Main’) bisects Montreal into east and west, is the city’s liveliest street, where the shops, bars and ethnic restaurants draw crowds until well into the night.
The best time to visit Montreal is in the summer, when even the nights can be sultry and the whole city seems to be partying, as the festival season (notably the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal) moves into high gear. The cooler autumns bring out the colours in the leaves and are a great time to visit the forested Laurentians or the rolling hills of the Eastern Townships. Even the cold and snowy winters can be enjoyable – the city authorities maintain more than 150 skating rinks in the region every winter where everyone can enjoy Montréal’s winter charms.
A centuries-old city wall encircles a thicket of spires and a web of cobblestoned streets, charming bistros and horse-drawn calèches abound and a grand copper-roofed hotel overlooks an historic river: given all of these riches, it’s easy to argue that Quebec City – the ‘cradle of New France’ and a UNESCO World Heritage site – is the most charming city in North America.