Montreal

The St Lawrence Iroquoians lived in the village of Hochelaga at the foot of Mount Royal when Jacques Cartier visited on 2 October 1535 and counted more than a thousand people there; by 1603, when Samuel de Champlain came, they had vanished from the valley. Champlain set up a fur-trading post in 1611, and on 17 May 1642 Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve founded Ville-Marie, a Catholic mission, on the island's southern shore. It survived Iroquois raids and a population of barely 50 until a hundred settlers arrived in 1653, then grew into the base of the fur trade and of French exploration inland. British forces took it in 1760, and American troops occupied it in 1775–76.

The Lachine Canal let ships bypass the rapids, the Victoria Bridge made the city a railway hub, and by 1860 Montreal was the largest city in British North America. The Bonsecours Market briefly housed the provincial parliament in 1849, and the Canadian Pacific Railway was founded here in 1881. English-speaking businessmen ran much of the economy, while French-speaking workers filled the factories and the growing districts around them.

The 1960s brought the Metro, the tallest towers in Canada and Expo 67. The 1970s brought the October Crisis, the 1976 Summer Olympics, whose stadium debt took three decades to repay, and the election of the Parti Québécois, after which many businesses and people left for Toronto. The island's municipalities were merged in 2002, though some voted to leave again in 2004. Since then the city has built two super-hospitals, new towers and the REM, formally inaugurated in 2025.

Montreal is the largest primarily French-speaking city in the Americas and the centre of French-language television, radio, theatre, film and publishing in Canada, yet it remains one of the most bilingual cities in the country: in 2021 more than half its residents could speak both French and English. Language laws set by Quebec shape signs, schooling and business, and are much debated in the city. UNESCO named it a World Book Capital in 2005 and a City of Design in 2006.

Summer is festival season, with more than a hundred events a year. The jazz festival closes downtown streets for free concerts, and the Francos, Just for Laughs and Osheaga follow; Place des Arts is home to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the opera and the ballet. The city is also known for its churches — about 650 on the island — topped by Saint Joseph's Oratory, and writers from Mordecai Richler to Michel Tremblay have set their work in its streets.

Hockey is close to a religion. The Canadiens have won a record 24 Stanley Cups, the last in 1993, and their games at the Bell Centre fill bars across the city. The Alouettes play Canadian football at McGill's stadium and won the Grey Cup in 2023, CF Montréal play soccer, and Jackie Robinson broke baseball's colour line with the Montreal Royals in 1946. The Expos played here from 1969 until they left for Washington.

The 2021 census counted 1,762,949 people in the city and 4,291,732 in the metropolitan area, the second largest in Canada after Toronto's. A third of city residents were born abroad, with Haiti, Algeria, France, Morocco and Italy the leading countries of origin, and visible minorities made up 38.8 per cent of the population. French alone is the first language of just under half of residents, English alone of about one in eight, and many others speak Arabic, Spanish, Italian or Haitian Creole as a first language.

The economy is the second largest of any Canadian city. Aerospace, finance, pharmaceuticals and the port remain important, and the city has become a centre of video game development since Ubisoft opened a studio in 1995 and a global hub of artificial intelligence research around the Mila institute. The International Civil Aviation Organization, Canadian National Railway and Air Canada have their headquarters here, and McGill, Concordia and the Université de Montréal fill the city with students.

On 1 July many leases end at once, making it the city's moving day. Daily life runs on the Metro, bicycles and walking in the central districts, terraces in summer and indoor passages in winter. Housing costs are a growing concern, and Soraya Martinez Ferrada is mayor as of 2026.

Two foods define Montreal. Smoked meat is beef brisket salted and cured with spices for about a week, then hot-smoked and piled into rye-bread sandwiches; Schwartz's on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, open since 1928, is the most famous place to eat it. Montreal bagels are smaller, thinner, sweeter and denser than New York's, with a larger hole, boiled and always baked in a wood-fired oven, in poppy-seed or sesame versions; St-Viateur and Fairmount in Mile End, the latter founded in 1919, are the city's two most famous bagel bakeries.

Both came from the city's Jewish community, and Quebec's own cooking supplies the rest. Poutine — fries with squeaky cheese curds and gravy — is sold everywhere, with La Banquise on the Plateau serving dozens of versions. Tourtière meat pie, pâté chinois, cretons on toast, sugar pie and pouding chômeur appear in bistros and family kitchens, and in spring city dwellers drive out to sugar shacks for maple-drenched meals and taffy on snow.

Markets are central to how Montrealers eat. The Jean-Talon Market in Little Italy is the largest, and the Art Deco Atwater Market sits beside the Lachine Canal. Chinatown, Little Italy and the many immigrant neighbourhoods add essentially every cuisine, and the 'apportez votre vin' custom of bringing wine to restaurants keeps neighbourhood bistros lively and affordable.