Luxury hotels in Montreal

Montreal guide

Old Montreal and the city of festivals

Notre-Dame Basilica, Mount Royal and a food scene that mixes Paris and North America.

Old Montreal, with its cobbled streets, Notre-Dame Basilica and the Old Port, is the city's most cited area. Notre-Dame's blue and gold interior is spectacular, and its evening light show, AURA, is worth booking.

Climb Mount Royal for the view, explore the Plateau and Mile End for bagels and smoked meat, and visit the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Summer is festival season, from the jazz festival to Just for Laughs, and winter has its own charm, with the underground city and the Igloofest.

Mount Royal and the Plateau

Mount Royal, the hill that gives Montreal its name, with a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, is one of the city's most cited places; the Kondiaronk Belvedere gives the classic view over downtown and the St. Lawrence. On Sundays in summer, the Tam-Tams drumming gathers crowds by the George-Étienne Cartier monument.

Below it, the Plateau Mont-Royal is a neighbourhood of colourful houses with outside spiral staircases, cafés and boutiques, and Saint Joseph's Oratory, one of the largest churches in the world, stands on the hill's western slope.

Montreal's food: bagels, smoked meat and the markets

Montreal's food is one of the most cited reasons to visit: wood-fired bagels from the famous bakeries of Mile End, smoked meat sandwiches at the historic delis of Saint-Laurent Boulevard, and poutine. Several of the city's restaurants rank among the best in North America.

The Jean-Talon Market, in Little Italy, is one of the largest open-air markets on the continent, and the Atwater Market sits on the Lachine Canal. In spring, a visit to a sugar shack for maple syrup is a Québécois tradition.