Palais des congrès de Montréal « 201 Viger Avenue West « Montréal, Québec, Canada

The official language of Montréal is French as defined by the city’s charter. French is the most spoken language at home in the city. Montréal is the second largest primarily French-speaking city in the world, after Paris.

The city of Montréal is composed of 19 large boroughs which are further subdivided into smaller neighbourhoods. The borough with the most neighbourhoods is Ville-Marie, which includes the city’s downtown, the historical district of Old Montréal, Chinatown, the Gay Village, the Latin Quarter, the recently gentrified Quartier international and Cité Multimédia as well as the Quartier des Spectacles which is currently under development. Other neighbourhoods of interest in the borough include the affluent Golden Square Mile neighbourhood at the foot of Mount Royal and the Shaughnessy Village/Quartier Concordia area home to thousands of students at Concordia University. The borough also comprises most of Mount Royal Park, Saint Helen’s Island and Île Notre-Dame.

Montréal industries include aerospace, electronic goods, pharmaceuticals, printed goods, software engineering, telecommunications, textile and apparel manufacturing, tobacco and transportation. The service sector is also strong and includes culture, tourism, civil, mechanical and process engineering, finance, higher education, and research and development, film and word affairs. In 2002, Montréal ranked as the 4th largest centre in North America in terms of aerospace jobs.

Montréal is also a centre of film and television production; the headquarters of Alliance Films, and five studios of the Academy Award-winning documentary producer National Film Board of Canada, as well as the head offices of Telefilm Canada, the national feature-length film and television funding agency and Télévision de Radio-Canada. The city is also home to many recognized cultural, film and music festivals (Just For Laughs, Just For Laughs Gags, Montréal International Jazz Festival, Montréal World Film Festival, and others), which contribute significantly to its economy. It is also home to one of the world’s largest cultural enterprises, the Cirque du Soleil.

Montréal is well served by a variety of media, including several French and English television stations, newspapers, radio stations, and magazines. There are four over-the-air English-language television stations: CBC Television, CTV, Global and CJNT which also airs multicultural programming. There are also five over-the-air French-language television stations: Radio-Canada, TVA, V, Télé-Québec and Canal Savoir.

Montréal also plays an important role in the finance industry. The official legal corporate head offices of Bank of Montréal and Royal Bank of Canada, two of the five biggest banks in Canada, are still in Montréal with their operational corporate headquarters in Toronto, Ontario. The National Bank of Canada, the sixth largest bank in Canada, Laurentian Bank of Canada, Desjardins Group, the largest regional bank in Quebec, are also headquartered in Montréal.

As a North American city, Montréal shares many cultural characteristics with the rest of the continent. It has a tradition of producing both jazz and rock music. The city has also produced much talent in the fields of visual arts, theatre, music and dance. Yet, being at the confluence of the French and the English traditions, Montréal has developed a unique and distinguished cultural face.

The most popular sport in Montréal is ice hockey. The city’s professional hockey team, the Montréal Canadiens, are one of the Original Six teams of the National Hockey League (NHL), and boast an NHL-record 24 Stanley Cup championships. The New York Yankees of Major League Baseball are the only other team in North American sports to have more championship titles, with 27 World Series titles.

Enjoy your stay in the beautiful city of Montréal!