Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city, is geographically as close to the European coast as to Vancouver, and in look and feel it combines some of the finest aspects of the two continents. Its North American skyline of glass and concrete rises above churches and monuments in a melange of European styles as varied as Montréal’s social mix.
This is also the second-largest French-speaking metropolis after Paris, but only two-thirds of the city’s three and a half million people are of French extraction, the other third being a cosmopolitan mishmash of les autres - including British, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Italians, Greeks, Jews, South Americans and West Indians. The result is a truly multidimensional city, with a global variety of eateries, bars and clubs, matched by a calendar of festivals that makes this the most vibrant place in Canada.
Montréal has always played a major role in advancing Québec separatism as it’s here that the two main linguistic groups come into greatest contact with one another. The tension between English and French culminated in the terrorist campaign that the Front de Libération du Québec focused on the city in the late 1960s, and the consequent political changes affected Montréal more than anywhere else in the province. In the wake of the “francization” of Québec, English-Canadians hit Hwy 401 in droves, tipping the nation’s economic supremacy from Montréal to Toronto.
Though written off by Canada’s English-speaking majority, the city did not sink into oblivion. Instead, the city has undergone a resurgence, becoming the driving force behind the high-tech industry that’s transforming Canada’s economy.