Montreal Trivia
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48 free Montreal trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Montreal was founded in 1642 as Ville-Marie by colonists from the Loire, fell to the British in 1760, was capital of Canada until a Tory mob burned down parliament in 1849, and spent the 20th century as the country's commercial capital until Toronto overtook it. This quiz covers that history: Cartier at Hochelaga, Maisonneuve's cross on the mountain, the Lachine massacre, the Underground City, the 2002 merger and 2006 demerger, and the language law that made French official. It also does the Montreal people visit and eat: Mount Royal's three peaks and Olmsted's park, Old Montreal and Notre-Dame Basilica, the Oratory's dome, Habitat 67 and Buckminster Fuller's Biosphere left over from Expo 67, the rubber-tyred Metro, the Olympic Stadium that took 30 years to pay off, the Canadiens' 24 Stanley Cups, the Expos, the Grand Prix on a man-made island, the world's largest jazz and comedy festivals, Cirque du Soleil, McGill, Leonard Cohen, Schwartz's smoked meat, wood-fired bagels and poutine. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Montreal and its landmarks, teams and events, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Canada quiz covers the rest of the country.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Montreal was founded in 1642 under what name?
Ville-Marie
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.
Q 02Which French explorer visited the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga at the foot of Mount Royal in 1535?
Jacques Cartier
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.
Q 03Who led the colonists who founded Montreal in 1642 and became its first governor?
Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve
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.
Q 04Mount Royal Park, opened in 1876, was designed by which landscape architect?
Frederick Law Olmsted
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.
Q 05Montreal fell to the British in 1760 during which conflict?
The Seven Years' War
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.
Q 06Montreal lost its status as capital of the Province of Canada in 1849 when a mob did what?
Burned down the Parliament building
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.
Q 07A surprise raid by some 1,500 Iroquois warriors in 1689 struck which settlement on Montreal island?
Lachine
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.
Q 08Which emblem was added to the centre of Montreal's flag in 2017?
A white pine
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.
Q 09Quebec's 1977 Charter of the French Language is far better known by which name?
Bill 101
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.
Q 10Which city overtook Montreal as Canada's largest in the 1970s?
Toronto
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.
Q 11Expo 67 came to Montreal only after which city, planning to mark a 50th anniversary, cancelled as host?
Moscow
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.
Q 12Expo 67's theme, 'Man and His World', came from a book by which author?
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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.
Q 13Habitat 67, the stacked-cube housing complex, began as whose master's thesis at McGill?
Moshe Safdie
Q 21Saint Joseph's Oratory grew from a chapel built on Mount Royal in 1904 by whom?
Brother André
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.
Q 22Celine Dion married René Angélil in 1994 at which Montreal church?
Notre-Dame Basilica
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.
Q 23What did James O'Donnell, architect of Montreal's great Gothic Revival church, do during his final illness?
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.
Q 14The Montreal Biosphere's dome, the former US pavilion at Expo 67, was designed by whom?
Buckminster Fuller
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.
Q 15Which anthem did John Lennon and Yoko Ono record in a Montreal hotel room during their 1969 bed-in?
Give Peace a Chance
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.
Q 16At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci became the first Olympic gymnast to do what?
Score a perfect 10
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.
Q 17Montreal's Olympic Stadium has the nickname 'The Big Owe', which refers to what?
The huge debt from building it
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.
Q 18Montreal's Olympic Stadium has a 165 m mast that holds what record?
World's tallest inclined tower
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.
Q 19The Montreal Metro, opened in 1966, is unusual among North American subways for running on what?
Rubber tyres
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.
Q 20Montreal's Underground City is officially known by which name?
RESO
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.
Converted to Catholicism
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.
Q 24Which goaltender backstopped the Canadiens to their 24th Stanley Cup in 1993?
Patrick Roy
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.
Q 25Which Canadiens star's suspension set off a Montreal riot in March 1955?
Maurice Richard
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.
Q 26The Montreal Expos, founded in 1969, were the first what?
MLB franchise outside the United States
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.
Q 27The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve sits on which man-made island in the St Lawrence?
Notre Dame Island
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.
Q 28Which trophy did the Montreal Alouettes win in 2023 by beating Winnipeg 28-24?
Grey Cup
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.
Q 29Brother Marie-Victorin campaigned to create which Montreal attraction, founded in 1931?
The Botanical Garden
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.
Q 30Guinness World Records named a Montreal festival the world's largest for which kind of music?
Jazz
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.