48 Fun Facts About Montreal

Montreal was founded in 1642 under what name?

Ville-Marie, 'City of Mary', was founded by a religious society to bring Christianity to Indigenous peoples, but the fur trade soon became the little colony's main business.

Which French explorer visited the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga at the foot of Mount Royal in 1535?

Jacques Cartier reached Hochelaga in October 1535 and named the mountain behind it Mont Royal; by Champlain's 1603 visit the St Lawrence Iroquoians had vanished.

Who led the colonists who founded Montreal in 1642 and became its first governor?

Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve vowed to raise a cross on Mount Royal if a flood spared the new settlement; it did, and in early 1643 he kept his word.

Mount Royal Park, opened in 1876, was designed by which landscape architect?

Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of New York's Central Park, planned Mount Royal Park; his design was only partly carried out when the park opened in 1876.

Montreal fell to the British in 1760 during which conflict?

Montreal capitulated to Jeffery Amherst in September 1760, effectively ending French rule in Canada during the Seven Years' War; the 1763 Treaty of Paris then formally ceded Canada to Britain.

Montreal lost its status as capital of the Province of Canada in 1849 when a mob did what?

A Tory mob burned down the Parliament building on 25 April 1849, enraged by a bill to compensate people for damage in the 1837 rebellions; within a month Montreal had lost the seat of government.

A surprise raid by some 1,500 Iroquois warriors in 1689 struck which settlement on Montreal island?

Lachine, upriver from the town, had 24 settlers killed and more than 60 carried off; the Haudenosaunee struck because French expansion westward was pressing on their trade and territory.

Which emblem was added to the centre of Montreal's flag in 2017?

A white pine, a tree of peace for Indigenous nations, was added for the city's 375th anniversary because the flag's four flowers honoured only its European founding peoples.

Quebec's 1977 Charter of the French Language is far better known by which name?

Bill 101 required shop signs in French only, a rule the Supreme Court struck down in 1988; Quebec responded with Bill 178, which kept outdoor signs French.

Which city overtook Montreal as Canada's largest in the 1970s?

Toronto passed Montreal as hundreds of corporate head offices relocated there, a drift that began in the 1960s and quickened after a sovereigntist party won power in Quebec in 1976.

Expo 67 came to Montreal only after which city, planning to mark a 50th anniversary, cancelled as host?

Moscow won the 1967 fair to celebrate fifty years since the Russian Revolution, then pulled out in 1962; Montreal's mayor bid again and the city got it with under five years to build.

Expo 67's theme, 'Man and His World', came from a book by which author?

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the pilot who wrote The Little Prince, called a memoir Terre des Hommes; Canadian thinkers meeting at Montebello in 1963 borrowed the title as the fair's theme.

Habitat 67, the stacked-cube housing complex, began as whose master's thesis at McGill?

Moshe Safdie built his McGill thesis as a model of affordable city housing, but its 354 stacked concrete boxes became homes that only the well-off could afford.

The Montreal Biosphere's dome, the former US pavilion at Expo 67, was designed by whom?

Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome housed the US pavilion; its acrylic skin burned off in a 1976 fire, leaving the steel frame, which reopened as the Biosphère environment museum in 1995.

Which anthem did John Lennon and Yoko Ono record in a Montreal hotel room during their 1969 bed-in?

Give Peace a Chance was taped on 1 June 1969 in Room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, with Timothy Leary, Petula Clark and a crowd of reporters gathered round the bed.

At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci became the first Olympic gymnast to do what?

Score a perfect 10: she did it on the uneven bars on 18 July 1976, but the scoreboard had only three digits and showed 1.00; she earned six more 10s and three golds.

Montreal's Olympic Stadium has the nickname 'The Big Owe', which refers to what?

The huge debt from building it took 30 years and a special tobacco tax to clear, and was paid off only in late 2006; the kinder nickname, the Big O, comes from the ring-shaped roof.

Montreal's Olympic Stadium has a 165 m mast that holds what record?

At 165 m and leaning 45 degrees, the Montreal Tower is the world's tallest inclined tower; Roger Taillibert designed it to haul open a retractable roof by cables, which never worked properly.

The Montreal Metro, opened in 1966, is unusual among North American subways for running on what?

Rubber tyres came from Paris: Montreal's mayor rode a newly converted line there in 1960 and came home set on the same system, the first of its kind in North America.

Montreal's Underground City is officially known by which name?

RESO is pronounced like 'réseau', the French word for network; the name covers more than 30 km of tunnels linking shops, offices and metro stations under downtown.

Saint Joseph's Oratory grew from a chapel built on Mount Royal in 1904 by whom?

Brother André, long the doorman of the college across the road, built the first tiny chapel in 1904; his heart, kept at the Oratory, was stolen in 1973 and recovered 21 months later.

Celine Dion married René Angélil in 1994 at which Montreal church?

Notre-Dame Basilica hosted the wedding, broadcast on television, on 17 December 1994; in January 2016 Dion returned to the same church for Angélil's funeral.

What did James O'Donnell, architect of Montreal's great Gothic Revival church, do during his final illness?

Converted to Catholicism: James O'Donnell, an Irish-born Protestant from New York, changed faith as his health failed and became the only person buried in the crypt of the church he designed.

Which goaltender backstopped the Canadiens to their 24th Stanley Cup in 1993?

Patrick Roy won ten straight overtime games in the 1993 playoffs, a record, the last three of them against the Los Angeles Kings in the final.

Which Canadiens star's suspension set off a Montreal riot in March 1955?

Maurice Richard had struck a linesman and was banned for the rest of the season; when NHL president Clarence Campbell took his seat at the Forum on St. Patrick's Day, the crowd erupted.

The Montreal Expos, founded in 1969, were the first what?

The Expos became MLB's first franchise outside the United States when they debuted in April 1969 at Jarry Park; after the 2004 season they moved to become the Washington Nationals.

The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve sits on which man-made island in the St Lawrence?

Notre Dame Island was raised from the river for Expo 67, partly with rock dug out of the Metro tunnels; Gilles Villeneuve won the first Grand Prix held there in 1978, and after his death in 1982 the track took his name.

Which trophy did the Montreal Alouettes win in 2023 by beating Winnipeg 28-24?

The Grey Cup went to Montreal on a come-from-behind touchdown in the final seconds, against a Winnipeg side playing in its fourth final in a row.

Brother Marie-Victorin campaigned to create which Montreal attraction, founded in 1931?

The Botanical Garden was the teaching brother's long campaign: the city founded it in 1931, in the depths of the Depression, and in 1939 he moved his botanical institute onto its grounds.

Guinness World Records named a Montreal festival the world's largest for which kind of music?

Jazz takes over downtown for ten days, with streets closed to traffic for free outdoor shows; the first festival, in 1980, drew 12,000 people to hear Ray Charles among others.

Which Montreal company began as stilt-walking street performers in Baie-Saint-Paul?

Cirque du Soleil grew out of Les Échassiers, 'the stilt walkers', and was founded in 1984 when government money for Quebec's 450th-anniversary celebrations put the troupe on tour under a big top.

McGill University was founded in 1821 from the bequest of a merchant of which nationality?

James McGill, a Glasgow-born Scottish fur trader, left £10,000 and his Burnside estate for a college; his wife's heirs fought the will in court, and teaching began only in 1829.

Leonard Cohen was born in 1934 in which anglophone enclave of Montreal?

Leonard Cohen grew up in Westmount, on the mountain's well-to-do slopes; the summer after his death in 2016, Montreal painted his fedora-wearing portrait some twenty storeys high on a downtown tower.

Schwartz's, a deli on Saint-Laurent Boulevard since 1928, is famous for which Montreal speciality?

Smoked meat on rye with yellow mustard is the house order at the deli that Reuben Schwartz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania, opened in 1928; its staff credit a ten-day cure for the flavour.

How does a Montreal bagel differ from a New York bagel?

Smaller, sweeter, denser, wood-fired: the dough has no salt and the rings are boiled in honey-sweetened water before baking.

Classic Quebec poutine tops fries and gravy with which ingredient?

Cheese curds from the dairies of Centre-du-Québec went onto fries there in the late 1950s; one café owner in Warwick reportedly warned that the mix would make a 'maudite poutine', a damned mess.

Which architect's firm designed Montreal's cross-shaped downtown skyscraper of the early 1960s?

I. M. Pei's firm designed the cross-shaped tower on railway land beside Central Station; the shops beneath it, linked to the station, were the start of the city's vast underground network.

The Montreal Protocol, signed in the city in 1987, is an international treaty to protect what?

The ozone layer was being eaten away by CFCs from aerosol sprays and refrigerators; the treaty phased them out, and every country in the world has since ratified it.

Which river joins the Saint Lawrence at the Island of Montreal?

The Ottawa meets the Saint Lawrence around the island; it was the fur trade's main canoe route into the interior, which made Montreal the natural base for the trade.

Which natural disaster blacked out much of southern Quebec, Montreal included, in January 1998?

An ice storm brought days of freezing rain, and the weight of the ice pulled down power lines; nearly 1.4 million Quebec customers lost electricity, some of them for weeks.

Mark Twain said Montreal was the first city where you couldn't throw a brick without doing what?

Breaking a church window was the punchline of his speech at an 1881 banquet in his honour; he had come to Montreal, he told the diners, to put himself under Canadian law and secure a copyright.

A study of 2001 census data found Canada's highest concentration of artists in which Montreal neighbourhood?

The Plateau, once a working-class district, had artists as 8 per cent of its workforce, ten times the national average, and was dubbed Canada's 'most creative neighbourhood'.

Which sport's first organised indoor game was played in Montreal on 3 March 1875?

Ice hockey came indoors at the Victoria Skating Rink with two teams of nine, who swapped the usual ball for a flat block of wood so that it would stay on the ice and spare the spectators.

Which mayor presided over Expo 67, the Metro's opening and the 1976 Olympics?

Jean Drapeau, mayor from 1954 to 1957 and again from 1960 to 1986, also landed the city a major-league baseball team, the Expos, who began play in 1969.

Which United Nations aviation body is headquartered in Montreal?

ICAO, the UN's civil aviation agency, has been based in Montreal since 1947; in 2013 Qatar bid to move it to Doha, and Canada's foreign minister vowed to fight 'tooth and nail' to keep it.

Montreal's video game boom dates from the 1997 opening of which publisher's local studio?

Ubisoft opened its Montreal studio in 1997 with government subsidies, offered as the city tried to replace lost jobs; its success then drew rival developers and publishers to set up there too.

Which bridge, opened in 1930, links Montreal to Longueuil across the St Lawrence?

The Jacques Cartier Bridge opened in May 1930 as the plain Harbour Bridge and took its present name four years later, after a public petition.

Which Montreal university was created in 1974 by merging Loyola College with Sir George Williams University?

Concordia University joined a Jesuit college to a school that had grown out of YMCA evening classes; its name comes from the city's Latin motto, Concordia salus, 'well-being through harmony'.