Montreal

Nothing taller than the mountain

Montreal is an island city named for its mountain. Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance founded it in 1642 as Ville-Marie, a missionary outpost on the St. Lawrence, and Mance went on to found the city's first hospital. Mount Royal still shapes the skyline: under long-standing city planning rules, no downtown building may rise higher than the summit, and the cross on top has been lit at night since 1924. The park covering the mountain was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed New York's Central Park. Beneath downtown, a network of tunnels and shopping concourses known as the Underground City runs more than thirty kilometres and lets people cross much of the core in January without going outside. Expo 67 drew more than fifty million visitors and left behind Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie's stack of concrete boxes that started as a student thesis. The city argues with New York over bagels, wood-fired and boiled in honey water here, and sends visitors home with smoked meat and an opinion about poutine.