7 Best Sights in Montreal, Quebec

If you're looking for peace and quiet, the narrow strip of grass and trees on Place d'Youville just east of Place Royale is an appropriate place to find it. It was here, after all, that the French signed a major peace treaty with dozens of aboriginal nations in 1702. It was also here that the first French colonists to settle in Montréal landed their four boats on May 17, 1642. An obelisk records the settlers' names.

The cobbled square at the heart of Old Montréal is part carnival, part flower market, and part sheer fun. You can pause here to have your portrait painted, buy an ice cream or watch the street performers. If you have more time, try to get a table at one of the sidewalk cafés, order a beer or a glass of wine, and watch the passing parade. During the holiday season you can order a mulled wine or hot cider in the market and warm up by one of the wood-burning stoves from your perch on an Adirondack chair. The 1809 monument honoring Lord Nelson's victory over Napoléon Bonaparte's French navy at Trafalgar angers some modern-day Québec nationalists. The campaign to raise money for it was led by the Sulpician priests, who were engaged in delicate land negotiations with the British government at the time and were eager to show what good subjects they were.

The oldest public square in Montréal, dating to the 17th century, was a market during the French regime and later became a Victorian garden.

When Montréal was under attack, citizens and soldiers would rally at Place-d'Armes, but these days the only rallying is done by tourists, lunching office workers, and flocks of voracious pigeons. The pigeons are particularly fond of the triumphant statue of Montréal's founder, Paul de Chomedey, with his lance upraised, perched above the fountain in the middle of the cobblestone square. Tunnels beneath the square protected the colonists from the winter weather and provided an escape route; unfortunately, they are too small and dangerous to visit.

On sunny summer days you can join the office workers, store clerks, and Downtown shoppers who gather in these two green squares in the center of the city to eat lunch under the trees and perhaps listen to an open-air concert. If there are no vacant benches or picnic tables, you can still find a place to sit on the steps at the base of the dramatic monument to the dead of the Boer War. Other statues honor Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96) and Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919), Canada's first French-speaking prime minister. Meanwhile, the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada's first prime minister, has been removed for he was one of the architects of Canada's inhumane residential school system for Indigenous children.

This large, leafy square is an oasis in the middle of Montréal's urban jungle of noise, traffic jams, and construction. Entering the square, which is surrounded by colorful and ornate Second Empire-style graystone homes, feels a little like entering a children's picture book, especially in winter, when the ground and the houses are blanketed with snow and the white stuff muffles all sound. In summer, locals spread out on the grass by the fountain or take a bistro table at the little gray kiosk (formerly a public toilet) café that serves sandwiches, salads, ice cream, and other cold refreshments—it even offers a book exchange. And for an unexpected bonus, some of the lanes to the side and rear of the square's beautiful houses have been lovingly "greened up" with street art and vegetation, thanks to a lot of hard work and effort on the part of the neighbors.

Although Square Victoria officially lies within the Quartier International, or International District, Montrealers consider it a part of Old Montréal. The square nicely blends its French and English heritage with an 1872 statue of Queen Victoria on one side and an authentic Parisian métro entrance and a flower market on the other. Both are framed by a two-block stretch of trees, benches, and fountains that makes a pleasant place to relax and admire the handsome 1920s office buildings on the east side. The art nouveau métro entrance, incidentally, was a gift from the French capital's transit commission.