Montreal's Most Iconic Landmarks

Notre-Dame Basilica rises over Place d'Armes in the heart of Old Montreal, its twin towers a fixed point in the old city since it opened in 1829.

It was designed by James O'Donnell, an Irish-American architect who was so moved by his own creation that he converted to Catholicism and asked to be buried in the crypt beneath it.

Built for a parish that had outgrown its earlier church, it was for a time the largest church in North America.

The restrained grey stone of the exterior gives no hint of what waits inside, where Victor Bourgeau's interior explodes in colour: a vaulted ceiling of deep cobalt blue studded with gold-leaf stars, intricately carved wood, and a sanctuary washed in blues, reds, and gold.

Hundreds of wooden statues, a soaring reredos, and light filtering through stained glass that depicts the religious history of Montreal rather than the usual biblical scenes make the space feel unlike any other church on the continent.

Beyond the main nave, the Sacré-Coeur Chapel at the rear, rebuilt after a 1978 fire with a dramatic modern bronze altarpiece, offers a very different mood.

The basilica holds one of the great Casavant Freres organs and one of North America's largest bells, Le Gros Bourdon, and it has hosted events from Celine Dion's wedding to the state funeral of hockey legend Maurice Richard.

In the evening the AURA sound-and-light experience projects across the vaults and columns.

Saint Joseph's Oratory sits high on the northwest slope of Mount Royal, its enormous dome visible from across the city and from the air as planes descend toward Montreal.

It grew from the devotion of Brother Andre Bessette, a humble porter at a nearby college with a reputation for miraculous healings, who built a small chapel here in 1904.

Demand from pilgrims was so great that the modest chapel gave way to the monumental basilica finished in 1967.

The Oratory is the largest church in Canada and one of the most important pilgrimage sites in North America, its Italian Renaissance dome ranking among the tallest church domes in the world.

Inside, the modern basilica soars with a starkly beautiful austerity, while the votive chapel below glows with thousands of candles and rows of crutches and canes left by those who believed they were cured.

Brother Andre, canonized as a saint in 2010, is memorialized here, and his preserved heart is displayed in a reliquary.

The approach is part of the experience: a grand staircase rises toward the entrance, and the central wooden steps are reserved for pilgrims who climb them on their knees in prayer.

Gardens, a museum, and the original tiny chapel round out the site, and the terraces near the dome offer sweeping views north over the city. Whether approached as a shrine or as architecture, the scale and quiet of the place leave an impression.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1860, is the oldest art museum in Canada and the anchor of the city's cultural life.

It began with a group of collectors and has grown into a sprawling institution of five interconnected pavilions straddling Sherbrooke Street in the elegant Golden Square Mile, its original 1912 Beaux-Arts building facing newer wings across the avenue.

The collection is genuinely encyclopedic, ranging from antiquities and Old Masters to Impressionists, and it holds one of the finest surveys of Canadian and Inuit art anywhere, alongside decorative arts, design, and contemporary work.

A dedicated pavilion traces Quebec and Canadian art from the earliest colonial period to the present, while another gathers international art from the ancient world through to modern masters, so a single visit can move from a Roman bust to a Riopelle abstraction.

The museum has also made a point of connecting art to wellbeing and education, with an art therapy and health wing and a strong roster of blockbuster temporary exhibitions that draw crowds from across the country.

Its permanent collection is free to visitors, a rare generosity for an institution of this scale, making it as much a civic gathering place as a repository of masterpieces.

The Biosphere is the immense geodesic dome that floats above Ile Sainte-Helene in Parc Jean-Drapeau, one of the great surviving icons of Expo 67.

It was designed by the visionary American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller as the United States Pavilion for the world's fair, a near-perfect sphere of triangulated steel that expressed his lifelong fascination with doing more with less.

Originally the steel frame was clad in a transparent acrylic skin, so that the whole globe glowed and enclosed a multi-level pavilion served by one of the longest escalators of its time.

In 1976 a fire tore through the structure and burned away the acrylic membrane in minutes, leaving the bare steel armature that visitors see today, a skeletal sphere that is arguably more beautiful stripped down than it was enclosed.

After years standing empty the sphere was reborn as an environment museum devoted to water, climate, and sustainability, a fitting second life for a structure by a man obsessed with the fragility of what he called Spaceship Earth.

Surrounded by the greenery and river views of the island park, near the Expo grounds and the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve racetrack, it remains a striking and photogenic monument to a moment when Montreal felt like the center of the world.

Place Ville Marie is the cross-shaped office tower that reshaped downtown Montreal when it opened in 1962, designed by the office of I.M. Pei with architect Henry Cobb leading the work.

Its distinctive plan, a Greek cross in section, gives every floor four corner offices and a strong, clean profile that became the symbol of the city's postwar modern ambitions.

Beneath the tower lies its quieter revolution: Place Ville Marie was the seed of Montreal's Underground City, the vast climate-controlled network of passages, shops, and stations that lets residents cross much of downtown without stepping outside in the harsh winter.

From this hub the underground network grew into one of the largest of its kind in the world, a genuine innovation in cold-city planning.

High above, a rotating beacon of light has swept over the city from the tower's crown since it opened, a nightly signature visible for miles.

In recent years an observation deck and dining destination near the top, reached by dedicated elevators, has opened the summit to the public, offering a 360-degree panorama from Mount Royal to the river.

At street level the sunken plaza and its ring of shops keep the base lively through every season.

The Montreal Botanical Garden spreads across some 75 hectares in the city's east end, ranking among the largest and most important botanical gardens in the world.

It was founded in 1931 by Brother Marie-Victorin, a Quebec botanist and educator, during the depths of the Depression, an act of civic optimism that has grown into a collection of tens of thousands of plant species and cultivars.

The garden is organized as a sequence of distinct worlds.

A network of themed outdoor gardens includes a tranquil Japanese garden with its pavilion and bonsai, and a large classical Chinese garden built with artisans from Shanghai, its pavilions and rockeries arranged around a lake.

A grand set of interconnected greenhouses shelters tropical rainforest, orchids, ferns, and one of the finest bonsai and penjing collections outside Asia, keeping the garden alive through the long winter.

The garden anchors the wider Space for Life complex alongside the neighbouring Insectarium, Biodome, and Planetarium, with the leaning Olympic tower rising just beyond its trees.

In autumn the Gardens of Light festival illuminates the Chinese and Japanese gardens with thousands of handcrafted lanterns, drawing evening crowds, while spring and summer bring the roses, lilacs, and food gardens into their full glory.

It is a place to lose an afternoon among plants from every continent.