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Visit Montreal, a city at the foot of Mount Royal, known for its majestic churches, the Olympic Stadium, and renowned festivals. Montreal is home
to Cirque du Soleil and is the world's second largest French speaking city. Come visit the Old Port Waterfront, Underground City, shops, art museums and endless cafes. Other attractions include: Notre Dame Basilica, St Joseph's Oratory, Biodome, the Botanical Gardens, and Chinatown.
Montreal, or Montréal in French, 1 (pronounced /ˌmʌntɹiˈɒːl/ in Canadian English, /mɔ̃ʀeal/ in International French, and /mɒ̃ɾeal/ in Montreal French) is the second largest city in Canada and the largest city in the province of Quebec. It is the francophone Metropolis of North America and also nicknamed The City Of Saints, due to the many streets starting with the name "Saint". At the 2001 Canadian Census, there were 1,583,590 people living on the current territory of the city of Montreal proper (new 2006 demerged territory).
The population of the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area (also known as Greater Montreal Area) is estimated at 3,635,700 in 2005 [1], making it one of the largest French-speaking metropolitan areas in the world. Montreal is ranked as the 15th-largest metropolitan area in Northern America ([2] & [3]) and 77th in the world. In 2006, according to Traveler's Digest and AskMen.com, Montreal is ranked as the Number #1 city in the world to live in for its culture, architecture, history and ambience.[4][5]
Montreal is situated in the southwestern corner of the province of Quebec, approximately 270 kilometres (168 miles) southwest of Quebec City, the provincial capital, and 190 kilometres (118 mi) east of Ottawa, the federal capital, 539 kilometres (335 mi) northeast of Toronto, and 610 kilometres (380mi) north of New York, NY.
The city is located on the Island of Montreal at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. The port of Montreal lies at one end of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which is the river gateway that stretches from the Great Lakes up into the Atlantic Ocean. Montreal is bordered by the St. Lawrence river on its south side, and by the Rivière des Prairies on the north.
The FIFA U-20 World Cup Canada 2007 will be contested in the Olympic Stadium (Montreal). This championship will be the 16th contested.
Huron, Algonquin, and Iroquois have inhabited the Montreal area for some eight thousand years. The first European to reach the area was Jacques Cartier, when, on October 2, 1535, he entered the village of Hochelega, on the Island of Montreal.
Seventy years later, Samuel de Champlain arrived on the island, but the village of Hochelaga no longer existed. In 1611, he established La Place Royale, a fur trading post on the Island of Montreal, but the local Iroquois successfully defended their land. The first permanent European settlement on the Island of Montreal was created in 1639 by a French tax collector named Jérôme Le Royer. Missionaries Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, Jeanne Mance and a few French colonists set up a mission named Ville Marie on May 17, 1642.
Ville Marie became a centre for the fur trade and the Catholic religion, as well as a base for further exploration into New France. The Iroquois continued their attacks on the settlement until a peace treaty was signed in 1701. The town remained French until 1760, when Pierre François de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal surrendered it to the British army under Jeffrey Amherst. Fire destroyed one quarter of the town on May 18, 1765.
The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the Seven Years' War and ceded New France to the Kingdom of Great Britain. American Revolutionists briefly held the city in 1775 but soon left. By this time, now named Montreal, the city started to grow from British immigration. The golden era of fur trading began in the city with the advent of the locally owned North West Company, the main rival to the primarily British Hudson's Bay Company.
Montreal was incorporated as a city in 1832. The city's growth was spurred by the opening of the Lachine Canal, which permitted ships to bypass the unnavigable Lachine Rapids south of the island. Montreal was the capital of the United Province of Canada from 1844 to 1849, bringing more English-speakers to the city, making the two linguistic groups roughly equal in size. The resulting increased Anglophone community built one of Canada's first universities, McGill, and the wealthy merchant classes began building large mansions at the foot of Mont Royal.
In 1852 Montreal had 58,000 inhabitants; by 1860 it was the largest city in British North America and the undisputed economic and cultural centre of Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway made its headquarters there in 1880, and the Canadian National Railway in 1919. Saint Jacques Street in what is now Old Montreal, then better known as Saint James Street, became the centre of the Canadian financial industry in the late 19th century; the name "Saint James Street" was used as a metonym for Canadian high finance as much as "Wall Street" is used in the United States, or Toronto's "Bay Street" is used in Canada today. With the annexation of neighbouring towns between 1883 and 1918, Montreal became a mostly Francophone city again. The tradition to alternate between a Francophone and an Anglophone mayor thus began and lasted until 1914.
After World War I, the Prohibition movement in the United States turned Montreal into a haven for Americans looking for alcohol. Despite the increase in tourism, unemployment remained high in the city, and was exacerbated by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. However, Canada began to recover from the Great Depression in the mid-1930s, and skyscrapers such as the Sun Life Building began to appear.
During World War II, Mayor Camillien Houde protested against conscription and urged Montrealers to ignore the federal government's registry of all men and women. Ottawa was furious over Houde's insubordination and put him in a prison camp until 1944, when the government was forced to institute conscription (see Conscription Crisis of 1944).
After Montreal's population surpassed one million in the early 1950s, Mayor Jean Drapeau laid down plans for the future development of the city. These plans included a new metro system and an underground city, the expansion of Montreal's harbour, and the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. New buildings were built on top of old ones in this time period, including Montreal's two tallest skyscrapers up to then: the 43-storey Place Ville-Marie and the 47-storey Tour de la Bourse. Two new museums were also built, and finally in 1966, the metro opened, along with several new expressways.
The city's international status was cemented by Expo '67 and the Summer Olympics in 1976. A major league baseball team, the Montreal Expos, was named after the Expo and started playing in Montreal in 1969. However, the team moved to Washington, DC in 2005, where it was re-named the Washington Nationals.
Currently, Montreal's favourable economic conditions allow further improvements in infrastructure, with the expansion of the metro system , constuction of new skyscrapers and the development of a ring road around the island. Neighbourhood gentrification is also occurring at a rapid rate. Montreal now constitutes its own region of Quebec.
In late 2005, Montreal hosted the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the first meeting joint meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol and to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Once the largest city in Canada, Montreal remains a vibrant major centre of commerce, industry, culture, finance, and world affairs. Montreal is a major port city along the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a deep-draft inland waterway which links it to the industrial centres of the Great Lakes. It's the largest inland port in the world and is one of the most important. As one of the most important ports in Canada, it is a trans-shipment point for grain, sugar, petroleum products, machinery, and consumer goods. For this reason, it is part of the railway backbone of Canada and has always been an extremely important rail city; it is the eastern terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway and home to the headquarters of the Canadian National Railway.
Montreal industries include pharmaceuticals, high technology, finance, textile and clothing manufacturing (the schmata industry), higher education, electronic goods, software engineering, building and city engineering, transportation devices, printed goods, fabric, aerospace and tobacco.
The headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency are located in Longueuil, southeast of Montreal. Montreal also hosts the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, a United Nations body); the World Anti-Doping Agency (an Olympic body); and the International Air Transport Association (IATA); as well as some 60 other international organizations in various fields.
Montreal is also a vibrant centre of Canadian film and television production. The operational headquarters and five studios of the Academy Award-winning documentary producer the National Film Board of Canada can be found here, as well as the head offices of Telefilm Canada, the national feature-length film and television funding agency. Given its eclectic architecture and broad availability of film services and crew members, Montreal is a popular filming location for feature-length films, and sometimes stands in for European locations. The city is also home to several distinct film festivals which contribute significantly to its economy.