Montreal travel guide

Top 10 sights in Montreal

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Jeangagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Notre-Dame Basilica

   A Gothic Revival church on Place d'Armes in Old Montreal, built between 1824 and 1829 to designs by James O'Donnell and given its twin towers in the 1840s. The sanctuary is famous for a deep blue vault studded with golden stars; John Paul II raised it to a minor basilica in 1982.

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2. 

   2© Thomas Ledl · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

   The largest art museum in Canada by gallery space, founded in 1860 and spread across five pavilions on Sherbrooke Street. Its 45,000 works run from Old Masters to Inuit art, and the free collection galleries make it the city's wet-afternoon default.

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3. 

   3© Wilfredor · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral

   The Catholic cathedral of Montreal, built between 1875 and 1894 as a quarter-scale St Peter's in Rome — a deliberate statement of loyalty to the Vatican after the diocese lost a jurisdiction dispute. The baldachin is a copy of Bernini's.

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4. 

   4© Dpalma01 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Saint Joseph's Oratory

   A basilica on the north slope of Mount Royal begun by Brother André, a porter with no money who built a chapel here in 1904 and whose shrine grew to the largest church in Canada. Its dome is the third highest in the world; the crutches left behind by pilgrims hang in the votive chapel.

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5. 

   5

   Old Montreal

   The historic quarter along the river, whose grey limestone warehouses and cobbled streets date from the fur trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was slated for demolition in the 1950s, protected in 1964, and now takes most of the city's visitors.

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6. 

   6© GarrettRock at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Montreal Botanical Garden

   A botanical garden of seventy-five hectares founded in 1931 as a Depression work project, with thirty thematic gardens and ten greenhouses. Its Chinese garden was built by Shanghai artisans and its bonsai collection is the largest outside Asia; it became a National Historic Site in 2008.

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7. 

   7

   Redpath Museum

   McGill's natural history museum, built in 1882 with money from the sugar refiner Peter Redpath and one of the oldest purpose-built museums in Canada. It holds an Egyptian mummy, dinosaur casts and the university's ethnographic and mineral collections, and admission is free.

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8. 

   8© Virginiewenglenski · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Montreal Holocaust Museum

   A museum founded in 1979 by survivors who settled in Montreal — the city took in the third largest group of Holocaust survivors of any in the world. Testimony recorded from those survivors is the backbone of it; a larger building is due to open downtown.

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9. 

   9© Jeangagnon · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Hochelaga

   The fortified St Lawrence Iroquoian town of about fifteen hundred people that Jacques Cartier visited in 1535, and which had vanished by the time Champlain came in 1611. Its exact site is unknown; a plaque on the McGill campus marks one candidate.

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10. 

    10© Creator: James David Rogers · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Montréal Insectarium

    The largest insect museum in North America, opened in 1990 from the collection of Georges Brossard, a notary who gave up his practice to catch insects. It was rebuilt in 2022 so that visitors pass through tunnels at insect scale before reaching the live vivariums.

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1. 

   1© storem · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Montreal Biodome

   A museum of enclosed ecosystems in the 1976 Olympic velodrome, where visitors walk in turn through a tropical rainforest, a Laurentian maple forest, the Gulf of St Lawrence, the Labrador coast and a sub-Antarctic island with penguins. Each has its own climate, held year round.

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2. 

   2© Eshko Timiou · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Côte-des-Neiges

   A district on the western slope of Mount Royal, one of the most linguistically mixed in Canada, with Saint Joseph's Oratory, the Université de Montréal and the largest cemetery in the country within it. Filipino, Sri Lankan and Caribbean communities are all concentrated here.

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3. 

   3© Montrealais · CC BY 3.0

   Hochelaga-Maisonneuve

   An east-end district south of the Olympic Stadium, built as the independent industrial town of Maisonneuve with Beaux-Arts public buildings meant to rival Westmount. Deindustrialisation emptied it; the market, the baths and the fire station of that ambition still stand.

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4. 

   4© Jazmin Million from North America · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Chapel of Our Lady of Help, Montreal

   A chapel on Rue Saint-Paul, the oldest church site in Montreal, founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys in 1655 and rebuilt in 1771 after fire. Sailors hung votive ship models from its ceiling, and an archaeological crypt under it holds the first chapel's foundations.

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5. 

   5© Quinn Dombrowski · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Chinatown

   A compact Chinatown around De la Gauchetière Street, settled from the 1860s by workers who came for the railways and the laundries, with four paifang gates added in the 1980s. Vietnamese and Cambodian restaurants now outnumber the Cantonese ones.

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   6

   Maisonneuve Monument

   A bronze monument of 1895 by Louis-Philippe Hébert on Place d'Armes to Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, who founded Ville-Marie on this spot in 1642. Four figures around the base include Jeanne Mance and the Iroquois whose land it was.

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7. 

   7© Joanne Lévesque · CC BY-SA 3.0

   château Ramezay

   A stone house of 1705 on Notre-Dame Street, built for the governor Claude de Ramezay and used in turn as a trading company office, a courthouse and, in 1775, the headquarters of the American army occupying Montreal. It became Quebec's first classified historic building in 1929.

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8. 

   8© The Cosmonaut · CC BY-SA 2.5 ca

   Mount Royal Cross

   A steel cross thirty-one metres high on the northeast peak of Mount Royal, put up in 1924 by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste on the spot where Maisonneuve is said to have planted a wooden one in 1643. Its lights were converted to LEDs in 2009 and can be turned purple to mark a pope's death.

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9. 

   9© Colocho · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Little Italy

   A district centred on Saint-Laurent Boulevard between Jean-Talon and Saint-Zotique, settled by Italians from the 1900s who worked the rail yards and market gardens. The Jean-Talon market at its edge is the largest open-air market in North America.

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10. 

    10© Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

    Place Jacques-Cartier

    A sloping square in Old Montreal that has been a market since 1804, running down to the Old Port. Nelson's Column at the top, of 1809, is the oldest monument in the city and went up thirty-four years before the one in London.

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