Montréal: Places to Explore

Downtown, Golden Square Mile, and Chinatown

Rue Ste-Catherine—and the métro line that runs under it—is the main cord that binds together the disparate, sprawling neighborhoods that comprise Montréal's downtown, or centre-ville, just north and west of Old Montréal. It's a long, boisterous, sometimes seedy, and sometimes elegant street that runs from rue Claremont in Westmount to rue d'Iberville in the east end.

The heart of downtown—with department stores, boutiques, bars, restaurants, strip clubs, amusement arcades, theaters, cinemas, art galleries, bookstores, and even a few churches—runs from avenue Atwater to boulevard St-Denis.

Walk even farther north on rue Crescent to the lower slopes of Mont-Royal and you come to what was once the most exclusive neighborhood in Canada—the Golden Square Mile. During the boom years of the mid-1800s, baronial homes covered the mountain north of rue Sherbrooke. Many are gone, replaced by high-rises or modern town houses, but there are still plenty of architectural treasures to admire, even if most of them are now foreign consulates or university institutes.

Sandwiched between the downtown and the Old City is bustling Chinatown, with a pedestrian street closed to traffic lined with restaurants and gift shops, as well as markets selling everything from hard-to-find Asian produce to dim sum.

And underneath it all—the entire downtown area and then some—is Montréal's Underground City, a vast network of more or less anything you'd find on the street above.