Canada 2026: Montréal

Getting there

We travelled from Toronto to Montréal on VIA Rail in Business Class, and it was a very pleasant way to travel. Plenty of space, attentive crew, and several hours to listen to a favourite playlist or audiobook without anybody expecting me to do anything useful.

Travelling downtown to downtown also makes a lot of sense. Once you add up the airport transfers, arriving at the airport early, shuffling through security queues, and waiting around for your bags at the other end, flying eats a lot more of your day than the flight time suggests. The train lets you turn up about thirty minutes before departure and simply walk on board. Put like that, rail starts looking very attractive indeed.

Hotel Bonaventure: location, location, swimming pool

We stayed at Hotel Bonaventure, which is actually connected to Montréal’s central train station. You can walk from the train to the hotel in less time than it might take to organise an Uber after landing at the airport. No traffic, no waiting around, no wrestling with luggage on a kerb. Just get off the train and walk to your hotel.

But the location wasn’t even the best bit.

Hotel Bonaventure has a rooftop pool surrounded by gardens, and I’ll be honest — it was one of the main reasons I booked the place. I’d got my hopes up, and it definitely lived up to the hype. Heated water, open to the sky, and blissfully quiet when we were there. After a morning out sightseeing, floating in a warm rooftop pool with the city humming away below you is hard to beat. I could feel the sun, hear the water, and forget entirely that I was in the middle of a major city. It was awesome, and I’d book the hotel again for the pool alone.

A tour, a cycling race and a missing mountain

The following morning, we booked a guided sightseeing bus tour to get a feel for Montréal. It was a good way to see some of the city without having to work out where everything was first.

There was just one small complication. We’d arrived during the UCI Road World Championships — an international road cycling race — so road closures meant the tour had to make a few detours. Mount Royal was one of the things we missed, which was a bit of a shame — though, as it turned out, we’d make up for that later.

Still, we got a useful introduction to the city, and it gave us a better idea of where we wanted to spend more time.

The French influence was immediately noticeable. French was everywhere, but what I found interesting was how effortlessly many people switched between French and English. As an English-speaking visitor, getting around wasn’t difficult, but there was no mistaking that Montréal had a distinctly French character.

After the tour, we headed back to Hotel Bonaventure and made good use of that rooftop pool. I could get used to this sightseeing business if it always came with somewhere nice to swim afterwards.

Boats and the city after dark

The next day, we took a speedboat cruise down the St. Lawrence River. It was more sightseeing cruise than extreme adventure, but there was enough exhilarating speed to make it worthwhile. The St. Lawrence has serious currents, and you could feel the boat working against them — the engine digging in, the hull slamming across the chop, spray coming over the side.

That evening, we booked a private night tour of Montréal. This time we made it up Mount Royal — making up for the detour the day before — where the views across the city were spectacular. Seeing the city lights spread out below us was well worth the trip.

We also rode La Grande Roue, Montréal’s observation wheel, which gave us another view of the city from above. Apparently, one way to see a city is to keep finding increasingly tall places to look at it from.

The contrast between Montréal’s skyline and Toronto’s stuck with me. Toronto seems to be in a competition to see how many more skyscrapers it can fit into the available space. Montréal takes a different approach, with building-height rules designed in part to keep Mount Royal from disappearing behind a forest of towers. The details get fiddly — elevation above sea level comes into it, alongside the usual planning restrictions — but the basic idea is straightforward enough.

It’s a fairly sensible idea. Not every available patch of sky needs to be filled with another apartment tower.

Built for winter

Coming from Australia, it’s fascinating to see how cities adapt to weather that would have most of us reaching for a blanket and reconsidering our life choices.

Montréal has an extensive underground pedestrian network, known as RÉSO, connecting parts of the city through shopping centres, hotels, office buildings and metro stations. The network covers roughly 33 kilometres of passages, although that doesn’t mean you can get absolutely everywhere without going outside.

In September, it’s easy enough to walk around the city and enjoy the weather. In the middle of a Montréal winter, when the temperature is well below freezing and the footpaths are covered in snow, I imagine the underground network becomes a rather more important part of daily life.

It’s one of those things that makes much more sense when you consider the climate the city has to deal with. Australia tends to design around heat; Montréal has clearly had to get creative about cold.

We also heard about winter activities around the Old Port, including ice skating. The idea of turning an outdoor space into somewhere people can skate during winter is a nice example of making the most of the conditions rather than spending several months wishing summer would come back.

I was quite happy to enjoy Montréal in September, though. I hadn’t come all this way to find out how well my fingers work in minus twenty.

Move over, New York

And then there were the bagels.

New York, you’ve got competition.

Montréal has its own bagel tradition — smaller and denser than the New York version, boiled in honey-sweetened water and baked in a wood-fired oven, which gives them a slightly sweet flavour. I was particularly hooked on a jalapeño and cream cheese one, and I’m not going to pretend I needed a more profound cultural experience than that. That’s a winning combination right there.

Montréal

We had a good few days in Montréal. We took it in from a bus, from the river, from Mount Royal and from an observation wheel. We got a taste of its French character, discovered some of the ways the city deals with winter, ate some very good bagels — and, of course, made full use of that rooftop pool.

Not a bad result for a few days in Montréal.

Next up, Québec City. Here we come.