Montréal takes its name from a 230-meter hill at the heart of the modern city, the Mont Royal. Here the Monkey surveys the skyline of modern Montréal, a far cry from the first significant settlement—Ville-Marie de Montréal—that French colonists established on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in 1642. The French settlers arrived over a century after the first French explorer in the region, Jacques Cartier, visited in 1535, finding an Iroquois village at the foot of the mont.

Montréal gradually grew into a major trading center, propelled by the harvesting of local lumber and animal pelts (Montréalphile that he is, the Monkey is not happy about that aspect of the city's history). But in its early decades, Montréal played second fiddle to Québec City, up the St. Lawrence, which served as the French imperial center in North America. When the French finally lost out to the British in the American imperial stakes in 1759 and 1760, Montréal became a British possession—and one that was briefly, from 1775 to 1776, overrun by the independence-seeking British colonies that were soon to become the United States. But the growing city retained an unmistakeably French air in cultural terms. It was also a strategically critical city, possessed of riverine port with access to the Atlantic and much of the fertile interior of the Québec region. By the second half of the 19th Century, Montréal was the chief port, railroad junction, and financial center of the massive Dominion of Canada, the reorganized British colonial administrative system in what would shortly become the independent state of Canada.

Montréal has remained a major Canadian city, long ago surpassing Québec City and now second only to Toronto in size and stature. The city retains several core traits of its French founders, not least in its peoples' appreciation of rich cuisine, its ambling attitude, architectural heritage, and the preponderance of the French language. In fact, it is said that Montréal ranks as the second largest French-speaking city in the world (after Paris).

Montréal's long history has ensured it carries a lovely hybridity of architectural styles. Indeed, the narrow streets of Vieux-Montréal, the old French colonial section of the city, is said to have the largest collection of 17th, 18th, and 19th Century buildings in North America. The Monkey was enthusiastic to take in the melange. In this shot from the Vieux-Montréal, the face-off between the neo-Gothic Basilique de Notre Dame (1829) and the Art Deco Aldred Building (1931) is particularly pleasing. Both structures front the Place d'Armes, the central plaza of Old Montréal.

The Monkey watches the waters of the mighty St. Lawrence Seaway from a walkway at the port of Vieux-Montréal. The striking clocktower behind him is the Tour de l'Horloge, a 1922 structure commemorating Canada's marine dead from the First World War. The bridge in the distance is the Pont Jacques Cartier, which holds the dubious distinction of being the locus for the most suicide attempts, after San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. It was built from 1925 to 1930.

Le Singe admires a lovely, slightly old building in the buffer zone between the old and new Montréal.

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