Montreal in 5 days: with Quebec City and the Laurentians

With five days Montreal becomes the base to see Quebec, which is something different from Canada and also from North America. The first three remain those of the city. The fourth goes to Quebec City, three hours by train or car to the northeast: it’s the only walled city north of Mexico, UNESCO heritage site, founded in 1608, and walking inside it you’re no longer in America. The fifth climbs into the Laurentides, the chain of hills and lakes where Montrealers go on weekends — and if you happen to be there in October, you’ll see the autumn colors that people cross the ocean to see.

The first three days

They remain those of the three-day itinerary: the old city with the mountain, the east Olympic with markets, museums with islands. If you come here from there you can skip to the fourth.

Day 1 – The old city and the mountain

9 km · Vieux-Montréal, Notre-Dame, underground city, Mount Royal, Plateau

Cobblestones and gray stone in the morning, the basilica with the blue vault, the thirty-two kilometers of the city under the city at noon, Olmsted’s hill in the afternoon and evening in the Plateau, among external stairs and hot bagels.

Day 2 – The east Olympic and markets

7 km · Olympic Stadium, Biodôme, botanical garden, Jean-Talon and Little Italy

The world’s highest leaning tower, five reconstructed ecosystems inside the former velodrome, the largest Chinese garden outside Asia, and a market open since 1933 even at twenty below zero.

Day 3 – Museums and islands

6 km · Pointe-à-Callière, Biosphere and Expo islands, Museum of Fine Arts

The excavations of the seventeenth-century city under the museum, the islands built with metro earth, and the collection of Inuit art among the most important in the world.

Day 4 — Quebec City, the walled city

All day · Train 3 hours 15 min, car 2 hours 45 min · departure at 7

Quebec City was founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608 and is the cradle of New France. It has something that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the continent: walls. It’s the only fortified city north of Mexico to still have the complete circle, four and a half kilometers of bastions, and that’s why the historic center has been a UNESCO heritage site since 1985.

The city is on two levels. The Haute-Ville, on the cliff of Cape Diamond, has the Citadel, the parliament and the Terrasse Dufferin, the wooden walkway overlooking the St. Lawrence, which is a kilometer wide here. The Basse-Ville, down along the river, is the merchant neighborhood of the seventeenth century: narrow houses, Place Royale, the Church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires from 1688 and rue du Petit-Champlain, which is the oldest commercial street in North America. Between the two levels there’s a funicular, or a staircase called, with honesty, the escalier casse-cou: the neck-breaking staircase.

The Château Frontenac, with towers and copper roofs, is the most photographed building: it looks like a medieval castle but is actually an 1893 hotel, built by the railway company to fill trains — a strategy that in Canada produced a chain of fake castles along the entire line. In 1943 and 1944 the Quebec Conferences were held there, with Churchill and Roosevelt planning the Normandy landings.

Other things worth it, if time allows:

• the Plains of Abraham, the park where on September 13, 1759, the English defeated the French in a battle lasting twenty minutes that decided which language would be spoken in North America. Both commanders died, Wolfe and Montcalm
• Montmorency Falls, fifteen minutes from the city: they’re 83 meters high, thirty more than Niagara, and you pass over them on a suspended walkway
• Île d’Orléans, an agricultural island in the river that remains as it was two centuries ago, with colonial houses and ice cider producers

Doing Quebec City in a day from Montreal means six hours of travel for the round trip. You can, but if you have flexibility sleep a night there: the old city lit up in the evening, when the tour buses are gone, is a different experience.

Day 5 — The Laurentides

All day · need a car · 1 hour 30 minutes from Montreal

An hour and a half north of Montreal the Laurentides begin, a chain of very ancient hills — they’re among the oldest rocks on the planet, over a billion years old — covered with forests and dotted with thousands of lakes. It’s the place where Montrealers have their weekend house, and where you really understand what Quebec means: water, trees and silence.

The road and the villages

Time half day · Free · Car along highway 117

You go up the old highway instead of the freeway, and pass through towns: Saint-Sauveur with its main street of colored wooden houses, Val-David which is the town of artists and climbers, Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts on the lake.

Along the whole valley runs Le P’tit Train du Nord: a former railway of 232 kilometers converted into a bike path, which becomes a cross-country and snowmobile trail in winter. The old stations have become cafés and bike rentals. If you have half a day and feel like cycling flat through the woods, it’s one of the most beautiful bike paths in North America.

Mont-Tremblant

Time half day · Chairlift about $30 CAD · National park about $10 per person · 2 hours from Montreal

Mont-Tremblant is the highest mountain in the Laurentides, 875 meters, and is Quebec’s most famous ski resort. At its foot is a pedestrian village of colored houses built in the Nineties: it’s beautiful and completely fake, and it’s worth knowing beforehand. With the chairlift you go up to the top even in summer, and from the top you can see the lakes to the horizon.

The real thing, though, is the Mont-Tremblant national park next to it: thirteen hundred square kilometers of forest with four hundred lakes, six rivers, black bears, moose and beavers. There are trails of all lengths, you can rent canoes and go down the rivière Rouge by raft. The name comes from the Algonkian, who called this mountain Manitonga Soutana, the mountain of the spirits: they said it trembled when someone violated its laws.

If you come between late September and mid-October, this is the day not to miss: the maples of Quebec turn red and orange all at once, and it’s a spectacle for which there is special tourism. The exact dates change each year by about ten days: you check the color bulletins published by the province.

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