Montreal Audio Tours

Montreal solved the problem of winter not by fighting it but by going under it. The RESO is a 33-kilometre underground city connecting 80 buildings, 60 residential complexes, 1700 shops, cinemas and metro stations below the surface of downtown -- the largest underground pedestrian network in the world, built so that Montrealers could go about their lives without touching the January air. Above ground, the same ingenuity that made the underground city also gave the world Cirque du Soleil, Arcade Fire and the Montreal Jazz Festival, the largest jazz festival on the planet. The city does not apologise for the cold; it makes things that are genuinely good inside it.

Old Montreal (Vieux-Montréal) is the limestone core of a French colonial city founded in 1642, with cobbled lanes that reach the St.

Lawrence waterfront. The Mile End neighbourhood, north of the Plateau, is where the Hasidic Jewish community and the Francophone artists have lived in improbable adjacency for decades -- Fairmount and St-Viateur bagel shops (baked in wood-fired ovens, smaller and sweeter than New York's) are the two poles of an ongoing argument about which is better. Schwartz's on Saint-Laurent has been making smoked meat since 1928 and the queue is always there, which is its own kind of quality guarantee.