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The 10 best things to do in Montréal

From Mont Royal's Olmsted-designed trails and Tam Tams drum circles to beer spa baths and sesame bagels fresh from a 1919 oven

Samuel Charron / Unsplash

Montréal holds a genuinely fun, quirky and multicultural character that consistently ranks it among Canada’s most compelling cities to visit. Wandering the city’s historic streets, past winding staircases, ivy-covered brick duplexes and restaurant lineups leading to a bagel shop or park, gives visitors an immediate sense of the creative, inspired energy that defines daily life throughout Montréal year-round.

Canada’s second-largest city rewards travelers willing to explore beyond the most obvious tourist stops, since much of what makes Montréal genuinely special lives in its distinct neighborhoods, its considerable festival calendar and its deep culinary traditions. Each of the experiences below captures a genuinely different facet of the city’s character across every season of the year.

The 10 things to do below appear in Lonely Planet, covering the best things to do in Montréal and the best way to do them. They range from historic neighborhood walks to Nordic spa culture, giving travelers considerable variety across nearly every type of experience the city genuinely has to offer. Montréal’s considerable cultural diversity, shaped by waves of immigration from France, Eastern Europe, Portugal, Italy and beyond, shows up throughout nearly every item on this list, from the city’s food scene to its architecture to its distinctive festival calendar. The French language and considerable European sensibility give Montréal a genuinely different feel than most other major North American cities, even as the city remains firmly rooted within Canada’s broader cultural and political fabric. Getting around stays genuinely simple throughout the visit, thanks to an efficient metro system and a considerable network of Bixi bike-share stations scattered across nearly every neighborhood covered on this list, making an actual personal car genuinely quite unnecessary for most visitors hoping to explore the entire city thoroughly over a considerably longer multi-day visit.

1. Montréal’s neighborhoods reveal the city’s local life

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Strolling around Montréal’s many charming neighborhoods gives visitors a genuine sense of local life alongside the city’s unique architecture. Old Montréal and the Old Port rank as the city’s most touristy areas, with souvenir shops, caricaturists and considerable cheesy attractions, though the historic buildings, including the Basilique Notre-Dame and Place Jacques-Cartier, still make the area genuinely worth visiting.

Le Plateau holds some of Montréal’s dreamiest architecture, alongside considerable thrift shopping along the Main, also known as Boulevard St. Laurent. The Mile End offers a genuine mix of trendy restaurants and Jewish institutions. At the same time, Petite Italie rewards visitors with fabulous food stalls at Marché Jean-Talon and Italian specialties such as cannoli and Neapolitan pizza. St-Henri in the west end serves as the place to go for trendy neighborhood restaurants and a stroll along the Canal de Lachine, and the east end Gay Village offers genuine all-night partying, especially during August’s Fierté Montréal, the city’s Pride celebration.

Montréal shows its best side in June and July, when locals flock to parks and terraces after the long winter, and again when the leaves fall in September and October. Temperatures can plummet to negative 28 degrees Celsius, or negative 20 Fahrenheit, and below between January and March, making summer and early fall genuinely the most comfortable windows for extensive walking. The city’s excellent metro system and Bixi bike-share network make getting between neighborhoods genuinely easy regardless of season.

Travelers $TRV 0.89% hoping for deeper historical context during a neighborhood walk should consider joining Tours Montréal, which leads guided walks through the Old Port, Gay Village, Mile End and Downtown, giving visitors genuine insight beyond what a self-guided stroll alone might reveal. Le Plateau’s distinctive winding exterior staircases, a genuinely iconic feature of Montréal residential architecture, date back to a period when the city taxed homes based on their footprint, prompting builders to place staircases outside instead of inside to save on square footage and considerable property taxes.

2. Parc Jean-Drapeau relives Expo 67’s architectural legacy

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In 2027, it will mark 60 years since the Expo 67 World’s Fair forever transformed Montréal. For the event, the city added to islands facing the Old Port to build the 520-acre Parc Jean-Drapeau specifically to host the fair’s pavilions. Visitors can still tour the former US pavilion, a geodesic dome now housing the Biosphère environmental museum, alongside architect Moshe Safdie’s surprising architectural feat, Habitat 67, which offers guided tours today.

Most summer weekends bring Piknic Élektronik, a mini electronic music festival, to Parc Jean-Drapeau, alongside La Ronde amusement park and a genuine beach for visitors hoping to cool off. The park also hosts many of Montréal’s biggest annual events, including the Formula 1 Grand Prix and the Osheaga and Île Soniq music festivals, giving it genuine year-round relevance well beyond its considerable Expo 67 history.

Parc Jean-Drapeau connects to the city by metro, though visitors hoping for the best views of the city skyline and the St. Lawrence River should consider biking there instead, since the ride itself rewards travelers with genuinely sweeping waterfront perspectives unavailable from the metro platform. This particular route also extends naturally into a longer ride along the Canal de Lachine for cyclists hoping to cover more ground.

This pairing of considerable architectural history and genuinely lively modern programming gives Parc Jean-Drapeau real appeal for visitors interested in both Montréal’s past and its current cultural calendar. Habitat 67, originally built as Safdie’s own graduate thesis project, was intended as a proof of concept for affordable, modular urban housing. However, its considerable construction costs ultimately made the finished units genuinely upscale instead of the affordable housing model originally envisioned. Safdie went on to design........

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