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Montreal in Quebec

Friday, 15 September 2017 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: North America / Nordamerika
Category/Kategorie: General, UNESCO World Heritage Reading Time:  12 minutes

🔊 Listen to this Post Montreal is the most populous municipality in the province of Quebec and the second-most populous in Canada. Originally called Ville-Marie, or “City of Mary”, it is believed to be named after Mount Royal. The city has a distinct four-season continental climate, with warm-to-hot summers and cold, snowy winters. Montreal had a population of 1.7 million. Montreal’s metropolitan area had a population of 4.1 million and a population of 2 million in the urban agglomeration, with all of the municipalities on the Island of Montreal included. Legally a French-speaking city, 60.5% of Montrealers speak French at home, 21.2% speak English and 19.8% speak neither. Montreal is one of the most bilingual cities in Quebec and Canada, with 56% of the population able to speak both official languages. Montreal is the second-largest primarily French-speaking city in the world after Paris.

Montreal has hosted multiple international conferences and events throughout its history, including the 1967 International and Universal Exposition and the 1976 Summer Olympic Games. Currently, the city hosts the Canadian Grand Prix of Formula One, the Montreal International Jazz Festival and the Just for Laughs festival. In 2012, Montreal was ranked as a Beta+ world city. Historically the commercial capital of Canada, it was surpassed in population and economic strength by Toronto in the 1970s. It remains an important centre of commerce, aerospace, finance, pharmaceuticals, technology, design, education, culture, tourism, gaming, film and world affairs. Being the location of the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization, Montreal is one of three North American cities home to organizations of the United Nations (along with New York City and Washington, D.C.) and also has the second-highest number of consulates in the continent. In 2009, Montreal was named North America’s leading host city for international association events, according to the 2009 preliminary rankings of the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA). According to the 2015 Global Liveability Ranking by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Montreal ranked 14th out of 140 cities. In the 2017 edition of their Best Student Cities ranking, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranked Montreal as the world’s best city to study abroad. With 170,000 students enrolled in its 11 universities, the Greater Montreal region has the highest number of university students per capita among all metropolitan areas in North America, including Boston, the intellectual capital of the U.S.

For over a century and a half, Montreal was the industrial and financial centre of Canada. This legacy has left a variety of buildings including factories, elevators, warehouses, mills, and refineries, that today provide an invaluable insight into the city’s history, especially in the downtown area and the Old Port area. There are 50 National Historic Sites of Canada, more than any other city. The architecture of Montreal is characterized by the juxtaposition of the old and the new and a wide variety of architectural styles, the legacy of two successive colonizations by the French, the British, and the close presence of modern architecture to the south. Much like Quebec City, the city of Montreal had fortifications, but they were destroyed between 1804 and 1817. Some of the city’s earliest still-standing buildings date back to the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Although most are clustered around the Old Montreal area, such as the Sulpician Seminary adjacent to Notre Dame Basilica that dates back to 1687, and Château Ramezay, which was built in 1705, examples of early colonial architecture are dotted throughout the city. Situated in Lachine, the Le Ber-Le Moyne House is the oldest complete building in the city. In Point St. Charles visitors can see the Maison Saint-Gabriel, which can trace its history back to 1698. There are many historic buildings in Old Montreal in their original form: Notre Dame of Montreal Basilica, Bonsecours Market, and the 19th?century headquarters of all major Canadian banks on Saint Jacques Street. Montreal’s earliest buildings are characterized by their uniquely French influence and grey stone construction. Saint Joseph’s Oratory, completed in 1967, Ernest Cormier‘s Art Deco Université de Montréal main building, the landmark Place Ville Marie office tower, the controversial Olympic Stadium and surrounding structures, are but a few notable examples of the city’s 20th-century architecture. Pavilions designed for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, popularly known as Expo 67, featured a wide range of architectural designs. Though most pavilions were temporary structures, several have become landmarks, including Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome U.S. Pavilion, now the Montreal Biosphere, and Habitat 67 apartment complex. The Montreal Metro has public artwork by some of the biggest names in Quebec culture. In 2006 Montreal was named a UNESCO City of Design, one of only three design capitals of the world (the others being Berlin and Buenos Aires). This distinguished title recognizes Montreal’s design community. Since 2005 the city has been home for the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda); the International Design Alliance (IDA). The Underground City (officially RESO) is an important tourist attraction. It is the set of interconnected shopping complexes (both above and below ground). This impressive network connects pedestrian thoroughfares to universities, as well as hotels, restaurants, bistros, subway stations and more, in and around downtown with 32 kilometres (20 miles) of tunnels over twelve square kilometres (4.6 square miles) of the most densely populated part of Montreal.

The city is composed of 19 large boroughs, subdivided into neighbourhoods. Many of these boroughs were independent cities that were forced to be merged with Montreal in January 2002 following the 2002 Municipal Reorganization of Montreal. The borough with the most neighbourhoods is Ville Marie, which includes Downtown, the historical district of Old Montreal, Chinatown, the Gay Village, the Latin Quarter, the gentrified Quartier international and Cité Multimédia as well as the Quartier des Spectacles which is under development. Other neighbourhoods of interest in the borough include the affluent Golden Square Mile neighbourhood at the foot of Mount Royal and the Shaughnessy Village/Concordia U area home to thousands of students at Concordia University. The borough also comprises most of Mount Royal Park, Saint Helen’s Island, and Notre-Dame Island. The Plateau Mount Royal borough was a working class francophone area. The largest neighbourhood is the Plateau (not to be confused with the whole borough), which is undergoing considerable gentrification, and a 2001 study deemed it as Canada’s most creative neighbourhood because artists comprise 8% of its labour force. The neighbourhood of Mile End in the northwestern part of the borough, has been a very multicultural area of the city, and features two of Montreal’s well-known bagel establishments, St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel. The McGill Ghetto is in the extreme southwestern portion of the borough, its name being derived from the fact that it is home to thousands of McGill University students and faculty members. The South West borough was home to much of the city’s industry during the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th century. The borough included Goose Village and is home to the traditionally working-class Irish neighbourhoods of Griffintown and Point Saint Charles as well as the low-income neighbourhoods of Saint Henri and Little Burgundy. Other notable neighbourhoods include the multicultural areas of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Côte-des-Neiges in the Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grace borough, and Little Italy in the borough of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, home of the Olympic Stadium in the borough of Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Old Montreal is a historic area southeast of downtown containing many attractions such as the Old Port of Montreal, Place Jacques-Cartier, Montreal City Hall, the Bonsecours Market, Place d’Armes, Pointe-à-Callière Museum, the Notre-Dame de Montréal Basilica, and the Montreal Science Centre. Architecture and cobbled streets in Old Montreal have been maintained or restored and are frequented by horse-drawn buggies carrying tourists. Old Montreal is accessible from the downtown core via the Underground City and is served by several Montreal Transit Corporation bus routes and Metro stations, ferries to the South Shore and a network of bicycle paths. The riverside area adjacent to Old Montreal is known as the Old Port. The Old Port was the site of the Port of Montreal, but its shipping operations have been moved to a larger site downstream, leaving the former location as a recreational and historical area maintained by Parks Canada. The new Port of Montreal is Canada’s second largest container port and the largest inland port on Earth.

The Mount Royal is the site of Park, one of Montreal’s largest greenspaces. The park, most of which is wooded, was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed New York‘s Central Park, and was inaugurated in 1876. The park contains two belvederes, the more prominent of which is the Kondiaronk Belvedere, a semicircular plaza with a chalet, overlooking Downtown Montreal. Other features of the park are Beaver Lake, a small man-made lake, a short ski slope, a sculpture garden, Smith House, an interpretive centre, and a well-known monument to Sir George-Étienne Cartier. The park hosts athletic, tourist and cultural activities. The mountain is home to two major cemeteries, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (founded in 1854) and Mount Royal (1852). Mount Royal Cemetery is a 165 acres (67 ha) terraced cemetery on the north slope of Mount Royal in the borough of Outremont. Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery is much larger, predominantly French-Canadian and officially Catholic. More than 900,000 people are buried there. Mount Royal Cemetery contains more than 162,000 graves and is the final resting place for a number of notable Canadians. It includes a veterans section with several soldiers who were awarded the British Empire‘s highest military honour, the Victoria Cross. In 1901 the Mount Royal Cemetery Company established the first crematorium in Canada. The first cross on the mountain was placed there in 1643 by Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, the founder of the city, in fulfilment of a vow he made to the Virgin Mary when praying to her to stop a disastrous flood. Today, the mountain is crowned by a 31.4 m-high (103 ft) illuminated cross, installed in 1924 by the John the Baptist Society and now owned by the city. It was converted to fibre optic light in 1992. The new system can turn the lights red, blue, or purple, the last of which is used as a sign of mourning between the death of the Pope and the election of the next.

Read more on City of Montreal, Montreal Tourismus, LonelyPlanet.com – Montreal, Wikivoyage Montreal and Wikipedia Montreal (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Global Passport Power Rank - Travel Risk Map - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.