Audio Guide: Montreal Introduction Walking Tour (Self Guided), Montreal

Canada’s second-most populous city likes to keep things interesting. Montreal is old enough to have stories carved in stone, yet modern enough to reinvent itself every few decades. It sits comfortably on an island in the Saint Lawrence River, with Mount Royal rising at its centre—the triple-peaked hill that gave the city its name. In 16th-century French, “réal” and “royal” were basically linguistic twins, so Mont Royal eventually became Montreal. A slight spelling shift, a lasting identity...

Long before European maps caught up, the indigenous First Nations communities had been here for almost 4,000 years. Then, in 1611, Samuel de Champlain arrived and set up a fur trading post. By 1642, settlers from La Flèche (a small town in the Loire valley of France) founded Ville-Marie—or the “City of Mary”—on the southern shore of the river, naming it in honour of the Virgin Mary. Officially, it stayed Ville-Marie until 1705, when the name “Montreal” began appearing in documents.

By 1832, it was incorporated as a city, and for a brief but notable stretch—from 1844 to 1849—it even served as the capital of the Province of Canada, the then British colony in North America. For more than a century, it was the country’s industrial and financial powerhouse, surpassed by Toronto only in the 1970s. This resulted in diverse architecture that shifts from French colonial charm to bold Victorian statements to bohemian flourishes, sometimes all on the same street.

Spiritually, Montreal once earned the nickname “the city of a hundred steeples.” Step near Notre-Dame Basilica, Saint Patrick's Basilica, or Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, and you’ll understand why. As author Mark Twain famously quipped, this was “the first city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window.” Not that we recommend testing the statement...

Culturally, the city's spotlight often lands on Arts Square, downtown’s major stage for classical arts and summer festivals. Administratively, Montreal is divided into 19 boroughs, with Ville-Marie gathering downtown, Chinatown, and the atmospheric Old Town—a district of cobblestones, the Old Port, City Hall, Jacques-Cartier and Arms squares.

Today’s Montreal is a hub for aerospace, design, technology, film, fashion, gaming, and cuisine—proof that a city can honour its past while coding its future. If you're ready to see what Montreal reveals to you, take your time and this self-guided tour and discover it on foot, at your own pace—one neighbourhood, one story, and one unexpected detail at a time...