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Montreal
Canada's great French-speaking city, on an island in the St. Lawrence
Montreal occupies an island in the St. Lawrence River where the French language took root in North America and never let go, a city that fuses European texture with North American scale. More than four million people live in its metropolitan area, the second-largest in Canada and the largest predominantly French-speaking city outside France. It is the cultural capital of French Canada, a hub of aerospace and software, and a place whose festivals, cuisine, and bilingual energy give it a character unlike anywhere else on the continent.
The city sits on the Island of Montreal at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, dominated by Mount Royal, the wooded hill that gave the city its name and rises to about 230 meters above the surrounding plain. The Lachine Rapids upstream long blocked navigation, making the island a natural stopping point and trading post. The St. Lawrence Seaway, completed in 1959, finally let ocean ships bypass the rapids and reach the Great Lakes. Bitter winters drove the construction of the Underground City, a vast network of climate-controlled passages linking downtown beneath the streets.
French colonists founded Ville-Marie in 1642 as a missionary settlement on land long used by Indigenous peoples, and it grew into the center of the fur trade across the continent. After the British conquest in 1763 it became Canada's leading commercial city, a position it held until Toronto overtook it in the late twentieth century, partly amid the upheaval of Quebec's nationalist movement. The 1976 Olympics left their mark on the skyline. Today Montreal is a thriving bilingual metropolis, the heart of Francophone culture in the Americas and a magnet for the creative industries.