Explore Montreal

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1860 as the Art Association of Montreal and is the oldest art museum in Canada. Its five pavilions on Sherbrooke Street West in the Golden Square Mile hold about 44,000 works, from Quebec and Canadian art and Inuit art to European old masters, decorative arts and design.

The Musée des Hospitalières de l'Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal is a history museum on Pine Avenue, opened in 1992 beside the Hôtel-Dieu hospital that Jeanne Mance founded in 1642. Archives, objects and art trace the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph and the history of nursing and medicine; the entrance hall holds a 17th-century staircase from the Hôtel-Dieu of La Flèche, France.

Notre-Dame Basilica is the Gothic Revival parish church on Place d'Armes in Old Montreal, designed by New York architect James O'Donnell and built from 1824 to 1829; its two towers were finished in 1843. Inside, a deep-blue vault with gold stars rises over carved wood, stained glass showing Montreal's religious history and an 1891 Casavant organ.

Pointe-à-Callière is Montreal's museum of archaeology and history, opened in 1992 in Old Montreal for the city's 350th anniversary on the site of its founding. Below ground, visitors walk through excavated remains such as Fort Ville-Marie, the first Catholic cemetery and an old collector sewer, beside exhibitions on the First Nations and city history.

Saint Joseph's Oratory is a Catholic minor basilica and national shrine on the Westmount summit of Mount Royal, begun as a small chapel by Brother André Bessette in 1904. Built in stages from 1914 to 1967, it pairs a Renaissance Revival facade and a large copper dome with an Art Deco interior; the site also holds a crypt church, a museum and the original chapel.

Château Ramezay is a stone manor on Notre-Dame Street in Old Montreal, opposite City Hall, built in 1705 as the residence of the governor of Montreal, Claude de Ramezay. It was the first building in Quebec to be classified as a historic monument and now houses a museum of Montreal's history, with the reconstructed Governor's Garden behind it.

The Biosphère is an environment museum inside the geodesic dome that Buckminster Fuller designed as the United States pavilion for Expo 67, on Saint Helen's Island in Parc Jean-Drapeau. The steel frame is 76 metres across; its acrylic skin burned in 1976. The museum opened in 1995 and presents exhibitions on climate, water and air.

Exporail, the Canadian Railway Museum, is a railway museum in Saint-Constant, on Montreal's South Shore, founded in 1961 by the Canadian Railroad Historical Association. Its collection of more than 140 locomotives, cars and streetcars fills the Angus Pavilion and an outdoor site; it includes Canadian Pacific 2850, which pulled the 1939 royal train.