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. read more…
The St. Lawrence is a large river flowing approximately from southwest to northeast in the middle latitudes of North America, connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. It is the primary drainage conveyor of the Great Lakes Basin. The river traverses the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and forms part of the international boundary between Ontario and New York in the United States. read more…
Quebec is the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec. The city has a population of 517,000, and the metropolitan area has a population of 766,000, making it the second most populous city in Quebec after Montreal, which is about 233 km (145 mi) to the southwest. The narrowing of the Saint Lawrence River proximate to the city’s promontory, Cap-Diamant (Cape Diamond), and Lévis, on the opposite bank, provided the name given to the city, Kébec, an Algonquin word meaning “where the river narrows”. Charles Dickens once called Quebec Gibraltar of North America. Founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, Quebec City is one of the oldest cities in North America. The ramparts surrounding Old Quebec (Vieux-Québec) are the only remaining fortified city walls that still exist in the Americas north of Mexico, and were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985 as the ‘Historic District of Old Québec’. read more…
