The Montreal skyline at dusk. Photograph © CORBIS

Montreal, a Touch of France
By Keith Bellows

I called Montreal home for 20 years and return several times a year. I can't help it. No city is more romantic, more lovely, more cultured, more cosmopolitan, or has more spark and élan than Montreal. This is a touch of France less than 50 miles from the U.S. border.

Come to Montreal and walk with me for 48 hours. Down leafy Sherbrooke Street past galleries filled with Inuit sculptures. Through the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, up past the châteaus and Victorians of Mount-Royal, to a park where in winter there are sleigh rides, skating, bunny-hill skiing, and the best views of the city. Along St-Laurent Boulevard (known as "The Main"), a Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Arabic, Cantonese, Yiddish, and Russian smorgasbord of slightly tatty markets, fabric shops, and restaurants where just about everybody's Old Country origins live on. Take a morning constitutional on rue St-Denis, Montreal's Left Bank, its Hipster Central, where a parade of the très fashionable puts New Yorkers to shame. Walk east into a Parisian landscape of corkscrew stairways and anorexic homes painted a riot of imponderable colors.

Then, for a true sense of Montreal's otherworldliness, explore the crazy-quilt fairyland of streets flanked by stately, story-steeped buildings in the Old City. Here the air hums with the clatter of horse-drawn carriages—calèches—and the chatter of French.

Then take in the parkland along the St. Lawrence, ribboned with bike and roller-blade trails, or step into a futuristic view of the past at the Pointe-à-Callière Musée d'archeologie et d'histoire de Montréal; here, where Montreal was founded in 1642, you'll find a hands-on, witty history of the city with, as befits its status as a tech mecca, a great multimedia show.

As you explore this world of the old, you must appreciate that Montreal has always been a city to celebrate the new. "I grew up in Montreal constantly reminded of the past," a friend living in Geneva once told me, "but I return there to get a sense of the future."

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.