Montreal

Montreal (French: Montréal) sits as Quebec’s biggest city, Canada’s second-largest, and North America’s eighth-largest. It was once the country’s commercial hub, but Toronto overtook it in both population and economic heft during the 1970s. Even so, Montreal remains a major center for art, culture, commerce, and global affairs.

The city was founded in 1642 under the name Ville-Marie, or “City of Mary.” Its current name comes from Mount Royal, the triple-peaked hill around which the early settlement grew. Montreal is built on the Island of Montreal and a handful of much smaller nearby islands, the largest of which is Île Bizard. It lies 196 kilometers (122 miles) east of Canada’s capital, Ottawa, and 258 kilometers (160 miles) southwest of the provincial capital, Quebec City.

According to the 2021 Canadian census, the city proper had 1,762,949 residents, while the metropolitan area counted 4,291,732—making it Canada’s second-largest metro after Toronto. French is the official language. In 2021, 85.7% of city residents said they were fluent in French, and 90.2% could speak it across the metro area. Montreal is one of the most bilingual places in Quebec and Canada, with 58.5% of people able to speak both French and English. It is the largest primarily French-speaking city in the Americas.

Montreal hosts the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization. In 2006, it was named a UNESCO City of Design. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked it the 12th-most livable city in the world in 2017, but that ranking dropped to 40th in 2021, mostly because of strain on the healthcare system from the COVID-19 pandemic. It regularly appears among the top ten cities worldwide for university students in the QS World University Rankings. In 2018, it was classified as a global city.

The city has hosted major international events, including the 1967 International and Universal Exposition. It is the only Canadian city to have held the Summer Olympics, doing so in 1976. Montreal also hosts the Canadian Grand Prix of Formula One; the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the largest jazz festival on Earth; the Just for Laughs festival, the biggest comedy festival; and Les Francos de Montréal, the largest French-language music festival. In sports, it is home to several professional teams, most notably the Canadiens of the National Hockey League, who have won the Stanley Cup a record 24 times.

In the Ojibwe language, the land is called Mooniyaang or Moon’yaang, meaning “the first stopping place” in the Ojibwe migration story tied to the seven fires prophecy. In Mohawk, it is Tiohtià:ke, short for Teionihtiohtiá:kon, which roughly translates as “where the group divided/parted ways.” French settlers from La Flèche in the Loire Valley named their new town Ville Marie in 1642, after the Virgin Mary. The name Montréal is generally thought to come from Mount Royal (Mont Royal in French), the triple-peaked hill at the city’s heart. In 16th-century French, réal and royal were used interchangeably, so Montréal could simply be a variant of Mont Royal. Another explanation points to Venetian geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who used Monte Real for Mount Royal on his 1556 map, though the Commission de toponymie du Québec disputes this. In English, the accent mark is often dropped, but the official name includes it (Montréal). François de Belleforest was the first to use Montréal for the entire region, in 1575.

Archaeological evidence shows First Nations people lived on the island of Montreal as early as 4,000 years ago. By AD 1000, they had begun cultivating maize, and within a few hundred years, they built fortified villages. The Saint Lawrence Iroquoians—a group distinct from the Iroquois nations of the Haudenosaunee, then based in present-day New York—established the village of Hochelaga at the foot of Mount Royal two centuries before the French arrived. Archaeologists have found signs of their habitation there and elsewhere in the valley from at least the 14th century. French explorer Jacques Cartier visited Hochelaga on October 2, 1535, and estimated its population at “over a thousand people.”

In 1603, Samuel de Champlain reported that the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians and their settlements had vanished from the St. Lawrence valley, likely due to outmigration, European disease epidemics, or intertribal wars. In 1611, Champlain set up a fur trading post on the Island of Montreal at a site first called La Place Royale, where the Petite Riviere meets the St. Lawrence River—now the location of Pointe-à-Callière. On his 1616 map, he named the island Lille de Villemenon after a French dignitary seeking the viceroyship of New France. In 1639, Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière obtained the seigneurial title to the island for the Notre Dame Society of Montreal, aiming to establish a Roman Catholic mission.