Montreal

Montreal is a big city in Canada. Many people there speak French.

The city is on an island. A river flows all around it.

Montreal is a city in Quebec, a French-speaking province of Canada. It is built on an island where two rivers meet: the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa River. The city's 19 boroughs surround Mount Royal, a wooded hill in the middle of the island.

Quebec's statistics institute estimated that 1,913,561 people lived in the city on 1 July 2025. Ships can sail up the St. Lawrence from the Atlantic Ocean to Montreal, about 1,600 kilometers inland.

Universalis describes Montreal and its 19 boroughs as surrounding Mount Royal, at the center of an island ringed by the meeting of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa River, which drain the Great Lakes region and much of the Canadian Shield. With a metropolitan area of more than 4 million people in 2016, it calls Montreal Canada's second metropolis and the world's fourth French-speaking city.

The Institut de la statistique du Québec's provisional estimate for 1 July 2025, used in Quebec's 2026 population decree, is 1,913,561. The city stands at the limit of ocean shipping between the Atlantic and the interior, about 1,600 km from the Atlantic coast.

Mount Royal is a big hill covered in trees, in the middle of the city.

People walk, ski and watch birds in its park.

In 1535 the French sailor Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River. The people of a village called Hochelaga led him up a wooded hill, and he named it Mont Royal.

Mount Royal is not an old volcano. About 125 million years ago, hot melted rock called magma rose under the area but cooled before it reached the surface. Over time, wind, rain and glaciers wore away the softer rock around it, and the hard rock was left standing as a hill. Its park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, opened in 1876.

The group Les amis de la montagne records that Cartier was welcomed by the villagers of Hochelaga in 1535 and led up the mountain, which he named Mont Royal. The city bought land for a park from 1872, commissioned the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1874, and opened Mount Royal Park on 24 May 1876.

The mountain is one of the Monteregian Hills. About 125 million years ago rising magma stopped a few kilometers short of the surface and solidified into gabbro; erosion by wind, rain and glaciers later removed the surrounding sedimentary layers, so it is neither a volcanic crater nor the result of plate movement. Quebec designated it a historic and natural district in 2005.

Montreal has a metro: trains that run in tunnels under the city.

The trains roll on rubber tires, a bit like a car.

Montreal's metro opened on 14 October 1966. Its trains run on rubber tires, and all of its lines are underground. There are four lines, known by their colors: green, orange, yellow and blue. Building began in 2023 on an extension of the blue line.

Since 2023 a newer driverless train line, the REM, has linked the city center with the other side of the St. Lawrence. From 1825, boats used the Lachine Canal to get around the rapids on the river. It has five locks and turned 200 in 2025.

UrbanRail describes the metro as rubber-tired and entirely underground. Lines 1 (green) and 2 (orange) opened on 14 October 1966; line 4 (yellow) crossed the river to Longueuil in 1967 with a stop on St. Helen's Island; line 5 (blue) opened in 1986; the orange line reached Laval in 2007. Work on a 6 km eastern extension of the blue line began in 2023.

The driverless REM opened its first section, from Gare Centrale to Brossard, on 31 July 2023, and further branches in 2025 and 2026. Parks Canada calls the Lachine Canal, which bypasses the Lachine Rapids, the port of entry for a canal network that linked the Atlantic to the heart of the continent; its 13.5 km route, with five locks, runs from the Old Port to Lake Saint-Louis.

Raccoons, squirrels and red foxes live on Mount Royal, right in the city.

Many kinds of birds visit the trees there.

Mount Royal's green area covers about 10 square kilometers, with woods, wetlands and meadows. More than 180 kinds of birds visit it, and nearly 20 kinds of mammals live there, including raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs and red foxes. Seven bird feeders stand along a path that winds around the summit, where birds can be spotted in winter.

Sugar maples and hickory trees grow mostly near the foot of the mountain, and red oaks and white pines on the summits. Thousands of years ago, beavers lived where Beaver Lake is now.

Les amis de la montagne lists more than 700 species of vascular plants (some rare and endangered), more than 90 tree species, more than 180 bird species (over 100 seen regularly), nearly 20 mammals, two amphibians and two reptiles on Mount Royal's 10 km² green territory of three summits, parks, cemeteries and institutional grounds.

Sugar maple and bitternut hickory grow mostly in the Piedmont sector at the mountain's foot, red oak and white pine on the summits. About 13,000 years ago, when the Champlain Sea covered the lowlands, the main summit stood 60 m above the water; gnawed wood under today's Beaver Lake shows that beavers lived there between 11,000 and 9,600 years ago.