About Montréal
See our Mini Guide for survival tips and information about transportation. See also WikiTravel's article on Montréal for a ton more information.
Things to do in Montreal
Montreal is a fantastic city. You may want to spend an extra day or two.
If you're a transit geek at all, you should probably allocate some time to spend in the metro and the REM.
http://stm.info/en (official website)
http://www.metrodemontreal.com/index-e.html (for transit geeks)
http://www.metrodemontreal.com/rating.html ("ranking" of the stations)
https://rem.info/en : the new (2023+) supplementary automated light-rail transit system complementing the metro. Under construction/expansion.
With its Bixi system (first and largest bike sharing system in North America), extensive network of over 200 km of protected cycleways (including nice park rides by the river or in the islands) and growing amounth of protected urban bike pathways, it is a very bike-friendly city (for North American standards, at least). See this cycling reference page, the city's reference page about bike paths, and OpenStreetMap's cycleways layer.
If you want to go to a museum, the Pointe-à-Callière museum near the old city comes very highly recommended. Its permanent exhibits cover the history of Montreal, and it contains the (in place) remains of many old buildings from the old city. Even if you're not the museum type, you will probably find this place to be extremely interesting.
For food, you should absolutely visit Schwartz's (3895 Saint Laurent Boulevard) for the most famous smoked meat on earth. There is often a long line to be seated at the restaurant, but they have a take-out immediately adjacent which has some limited seating inside as well. If all else fails, a reasonable alternative ("Main Deli") is almost directly across the street.
The main factory for Fairmount Bagel (74 Fairmount Ave West) has (arguably) the most famous bagels in the universe (having been on the international space station twice). Their best is plain sesame fresh out of the oven with nothing on it. There is nowhere to sit here other than some park benches on the street nearby.
San Francisco may have "an abandoned warehouse kitted up as for a rave" for GNOME, but ours is actually maintained.
For a much more thorough guide on discovering Montréal, see https://wikitravel.org/en/Montreal
GNOME events that previously happened in Montreal
Mostly the non-Boston editions of the north-american GNOME Summit:
Also the 2024 GStreamer Conference and 2024 XDC.