How many stops are on the Nightlife walking tour in Montreal?

The Nightlife route in Montreal includes 12 curated stops.

How long does the Nightlife tour in Montreal take?

The Nightlife walking tour in Montreal takes approximately 6 hours at a leisurely pace.

Is the Nightlife walking tour in Montreal free?

Yes, Promenario's Nightlife tour in Montreal is free to download and use, with full offline support.

🇨🇦 Montreal, Canada

Nightlife in Montreal

Evening districts, bars, and lively after-dark streets. Explore 12 curated stops in Montreal, including Notre-Dame Basilica, Old Montreal, and Place Jacques-Cartier. Highlights include Notre-Dame Basilica, rated 4.7/5 by 20,554 visitors.

12 stops ~6h Available in app

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12 places in this collection

Nightlife places

12 places in this collection

Image by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0

Notre-Dame Basilica

Notre-Dame Basilica (French: Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal) is a basilica in the historic district of Old Montreal. The church is located at 110 Notre-Dame Street West, at the corner of Saint Sulpice Street. It is located next to the Saint-Sulpice Seminary and faces the Place d'Armes square. The interior of the church is amongst the most dramatic in the world and regarded as a masterpiece of Gothic Revival architecture. The vaults are coloured deep blue and decorated with golden stars, and the rest of the sanctuary is decorated in blues, azures, reds, purples, silver, and gold. It is filled with hundreds of intricate wooden carvings and several religious statues. Unusual for a church, the stained glass windows along the walls of the sanctuary do not depict biblical scenes, but rather scenes from the religious history of Montreal. It also has a Casavant Frères pipe organ, dated 1891, which comprises four keyboards, 92 stops using electropneumatic action and an adjustable combination system, 7000 individual pipes and a pedal board. Approximately 11 million people visit Notre-Dame Basilica every year, making it one of the most visited monuments in North America.

Image by Gilbert Bochenek, Public domain

Old Montreal

Old Montreal (French: Vieux-Montréal) is a historic neighbourhood within the municipality of Montreal. Founded by French settlers in 1642 as Fort Ville-Marie, Old Montreal is home to many structures dating back to the era of New France. The 17th century settlement lends its name to the borough in which the neighbourhood lies, Ville-Marie. Home to the Old Port of Montreal, the neighbourhood is bordered on the west by McGill Street, on the north by Ruelle des Fortifications, on the east by rue Saint-André, and on the south by the Saint Lawrence River. Following recent amendments, the neighbourhood has expanded to include the Rue des Soeurs Grises in the west, Saint Antoine Street in the north, and Saint Hubert Street in the east. In 1964, much of Old Montreal was declared a historic district by the Ministère des Affaires culturelles du Québec. Old Montreal is a major tourist attraction. With some of its buildings dating to the 17th century, it is one of the oldest urban areas in North America. Champ de Mars is a large public space located between Montreal City Hall and the Ville-Marie Expressway. It offers a view of downtown Montreal and Chinatown. It is notable due to its location and its archaeological remains. The two parallel lines of stone are one of the few spots in present-day Montreal where you can still see physical evidence of the fortified settlement from colonial times.

Image by Jeangagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0

Place Jacques-Cartier

Place Jacques-Cartier (English: Jacques Cartier square) is a square located in Old Montreal. In 1723, the Château Vaudreuil was built for Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil - its formal gardens occupying the space that is now the square. The Chateau burned down in 1803 and it was suggested by The Hon. Jean-Baptiste Durocher and The Hon. Joseph Périnault that the space be transformed into a public square, known as New Market Place. In 1809, Montreal's oldest public monument was raised there, Nelson's Column. In 1847, the square was renamed in honour of Jacques Cartier, the explorer who claimed Canada for France in 1535. The broad, divided street slopes steeply downhill from Montreal City Hall and rue Notre-Dame to the waterfront and rue de la Commune. During the high tourist season, the street hosts many street artists and kiosks. During the Christmas season, the street is lined with lighted trees. At any time of year, one can find restaurants on both sides of the street and many more on the surrounding streets of Vieux Port, notably on Rue Saint-Paul. It is a car-free zone in the summer. During the summer season, Jardin Nelson offers a garden restaurant on Place Jacques-Cartier. Other restaurants similarly offer classical Parisian-style 'terraces' for taking a drink or dining in the open air. And on the other side of the place, the famous restaurant Saint-Amable (the oldest restaurant in town) welcomes Montreal celebrities and locals in a crooner jazz atmosphere. Near Place Jacques-Cartier on rue de la Commune, an original piece of the wall of the old fortified city can still be seen in the basement restaurant of the Auberge du Vieux-Port. At the upper end of the Place stands Nelson's Column, built in memory of Admiral Horatio Nelson. The statue was removed in 1997 to preserve it from the weather, and was subsequently replaced with a copy.

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Image by Gribeco, CC BY-SA 3.0

Bonsecours Market

Bonsecours Market (French: Marché Bonsecours), at 350 rue Saint-Paul in Old Montreal, is a two-story domed public market. For more than 100 years, it was the main public market in the Montreal area. It also briefly accommodated the Parliament of United Canada for one session in 1849. Named for the adjacent Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel, it opened in 1847. During 1849 the building was used for the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada. The market's design was influenced by Dublin's Customs House. Construction of this Palladian style building began in 1844 and were completed in 1847. It was designed by British architect William Footner, and alterations completed in 1860 were designed by Irish-born Montreal architect George Browne (1811–1885). Bonsecours Market also housed Montreal City Hall between 1852 and 1878. The former city hall chambers later became a 3700-square-meter meeting room. The market building was also a venue for banquets, exhibitions and other festivals. Browne was charged with adding a 900-square-meter concert hall and banquet hall. The building continued to house the farmer's central market, an increasingly multicultural mix of small vendors with business mainly conducted in the French language, until it was closed in 1963 and slated for demolition. However, the building was later transformed into a multi-purpose facility, with a mall that houses outdoor cafés, restaurants and boutiques on the main and second floors, as well as a rental hall and banquet rooms on the lower and upper floors and municipal office space. Bonsecours Market was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1984

Image by Jeangagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0

McCord Museum

The McCord Museum (French: Musée McCord) is a public research and teaching museum dedicated to the preservation, study, diffusion, and appreciation of Canadian history. The museum, whose full name is McCord Museum of Canadian History, is located next to McGill University, in downtown Montreal. On October 13, 1921, the McCord National Museum, as it was then called, moved to the former McGill Union building, designed by Percy Erskine Nobbs in the Arts and Crafts tradition. The collection was based on the McCord family collection. Since 1878, David Ross McCord had been adding to the already considerable collection assembled by his family since their arrival in Canada. Over the years, he developed the plan of founding a national history museum in Montreal, at that time Canada's metropolis. The building that now houses the museum was administered by McGill University for over sixty years, when it was the seat of the student government. After riots targeted at SSMU led to the building's storming and several executives being taken hostage, McGill University set out to build a more secure building, University Center, the current seat of SSMU. Leading members of the community lent their support to the museum over the years. Today, the McCord Museum is supported by the governments of Canada, Quebec and Montreal, and by a large network of members, donors and sponsors. The museum was founded in 1921 by David Ross McCord, based on his own family collection of objects. Since then, the museum's holdings have increased substantially.

Image by Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0

Place d'Armes

Place d'Armes is a square in Old Montreal quarter of Montreal. In the centre, there is a monument in memory of Paul de Chomedey, founder of Montreal. Buildings that surround it include Notre-Dame Basilica, Saint-Sulpice Seminary, New York Life Building, Aldred Building, Bank of Montreal head office and 500 Place D’Armes. Place d'Armes is the second oldest public site in Montreal. It was called Place de la Fabrique when it was first developed in 1693, at the request of the Sulpicians, then later renamed Place d'Armes in 1721 when it became the stage of various military events. From 1781 to 1813, it was used as a hay and wood market, then developed as a Victorian garden after it was acquired by the city in 1836. The Place d'Armes is the third location in Montreal to bear that name, a long-used French term for a place where a city's defenders assemble. A monument to George III was elected in 1773 in Place d'Armes, the first known public monument in the city. On 1 May 1775, the bust of George III was found defaced in an act to denounce the Quebec Act which guarantees the use of French language. A reward of 500 guineas did not lead to apprehension of the culprit. It disappeared soon after, during the American invasion of Montreal (November 1775 – June 1776), and was only found several years later at the bottom of a well in the square. The square now features a monument in memory of Paul de Chomedey (1895), by artist Louis-Philippe Hébert, commemorating Chomedey's defense of the young French settlement against the Iroquois, against whom de Maisonneuve's allies the Hurons were fighting. Foundations from the original Notre-Dame Church lie under the square.

Image by Jeangagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0

Place Ville Marie

Place Ville Marie (PVM for short) is a large office and shopping complex in downtown Montreal, comprising four office buildings and an underground shopping plaza. The main building, 1 Place Ville Marie (formerly Royal Bank Tower from its anchor tenant), built in the International style in 1962 as headquarters for the Royal Bank of Canada, which it still is presently. It is a 188 m (617 ft), 47-storey, cruciform office tower. The complex is a nexus for Montreal's Underground City, the world's busiest, with indoor access to over 1,600 businesses, numerous subway stations, a suburban transportation terminal, and tunnels extending throughout downtown. A counter-clockwise rotating beacon on the rooftop lights up at night, illuminating the surrounding sky with up to four white horizontal beams that can be seen as far as 50 kilometres (31 mi) away. The name 'Place Ville Marie' is often used to refer to the cruciform building only, but it also applies to four shorter office buildings which were built around it in 1963 and 1964, and to the urban plaza which lies on top of the largest section of the shopping promenade, and between the buildings.

Image by Jeangagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0

Redpath Museum

The Redpath Museum is a museum of natural history belonging to McGill University and located on the university's campus at 859 Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. It was built in 1882 as a gift from the sugar baron Peter Redpath. It houses collections of interest to ethnology, biology, paleontology, and mineralogy/geology. The collections were started by some of the same individuals who founded the Smithsonian and Royal Ontario Museum collections. The current director is Hans Larsson. Commissioned by Redpath to mark the 25th anniversary of Sir John William Dawson's appointment as Principal, the Museum was designed by A.C. Hutchison and A.D. Steele. McGill University's Redpath Museum website characterizes it as an 'idiosyncratic expression of eclectic Victorian Classicism' as well as 'an unusual and late example of the Greek Revival in North America.' It is the oldest building built specifically to be a museum in Canada. Both the museum's interior and exterior have been utilized as a set, for movies and commercials.

Image by John, CC BY 2.0

Sherbrooke Street

Sherbrooke Street (officially in French: rue Sherbrooke) is a major east-west artery and at 31.3 kilometres (19.4 mi) in length, is the second longest street on the Island of Montreal. The street begins in the town of Montreal West and ends on the extreme tip of the island in Pointe-aux-Trembles, intersecting Gouin Boulevard and joining up with Notre-Dame Street. East of Cavendish Boulevard this road is part of Quebec Route 138. The street is divided into two portions. Sherbrooke Street East is located east of Saint Laurent Boulevard and Sherbrooke Street West is located west. Sherbrooke Street West is home to many historic mansions that comprised its exclusive Golden Square Mile district, including the now-demolished Van Horne Mansion, the imposing Beaux-Arts style Montreal Masonic Memorial Temple as well as several historic properties incorporated into Maison Alcan, the world headquarters for Alcan. Sherbrooke Street East runs along the edge (both administrative and topographic) of the Plateau Mont-Royal, at the top of a marked hillside known as Côte à Baron, and continues between the Jardin Botanique de Montréal and Parc Maisonneuve to the north and Parc Olympique to the south. The street is named for John Coape Sherbrooke, the Governor General of British North America from 1816-18. Other key attractions on the street include the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Grand Séminaire de Montréal, McCord Museum, Ritz-Carlton Montreal, Holt Renfrew, Parc Lafontaine, and further east, the Château Dufresne, Olympic Stadium, Montreal Botanical Garden and the Montreal Biodome.

Image by Chicoutimi, CC BY-SA 3.0

Crescent Street

Crescent Street (officially in French: rue Crescent) is a southbound street in downtown Montreal. Running perpendicular to Saint Catherine Street, Crescent Street descends from Sherbrooke Street south to René Lévesque Boulevard. Crescent Street is a popular attraction for both tourists and locals. North of De Maisonneuve Boulevard, there are many luxury boutiques and art galleries in a Victorian architectural setting. To the south of de Maisonneuve is a concentration of nightclubs, bars, and restaurants. The street, which opened around 1860, was originally in the form of a crescent, and was just north of Dorchester Boulevard. The first bar on Crescent Street opened in 1967. Prior to that year, the street was home mainly to professional offices. Crescent Street merchants hold an annual street fair, known as the Grand Prix Festival, the week prior to the Formula One Canadian Grand Prix with open air free concerts, terraces for the bars into the streets, street vendors, and racing displays. This festival unofficially kicks off Montreal's festival season.

Image by Jiaqian AirplaneFan, CC BY 3.0

Chinatown

Chinatown in Montreal (French: Le quartier chinois de Montréal) is located in the area of De la Gauchetière Street in Montreal. The neighbourhood contains many Asian restaurants, food markets, and convenience stores as well being home to many of Montreal's East Asian community centres, such as the Montreal Chinese Hospital and the Montreal Chinese Community and Cultural Center. CHUM Hospital is located in Chinatown. Montreal's Chinatown is a vibrant nightspot for locals and tourists alike thanks to a special regulation by Montreal's city officials which slates the sector as a tourist area, thus allowing it to continue operations well into the evening. Cantonese seafood, barbecue and dim sum restaurants and Vietnamese Phở eateries are featured in Chinatown. Many local Asian-Canadians frequent the area since the shops offer products directly imported from Mainland China or Vietnam that are difficult to find elsewhere in town.

Image by Jeangagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0

Saint Denis Street

Saint Denis Street (officially in French: Rue Saint-Denis) is a major north-south thoroughfare in Montreal. It extends from the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel on Saint Paul Street in Old Montreal to the bank of the Rivière des Prairies at the north end of the island. It is designated Route 335 from Sherbrooke Street to the Metropolitan Expressway, and is known as Bonsecours Street south of Saint Antoine Street. Along its length, it passes through the boroughs of Ville-Marie, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension, and Ahuntsic-Cartierville. Saint-Denis serves as one of the primary thoroughfares of both the Latin Quarter, where it plays host to a number of bars and restaurants, to the Plateau Mont-Royal, where it is known as one of the best places to view Montreal's distinct style of architecture. It becomes primarily a residential street north of the Metropolitan Expressway. The eastern portion of the Montreal Metro's Orange Line runs parallel to the street, two blocks to the east. It is named for Saint Denis of Paris.

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