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The island Montreal now occupies was inhabited for thousands of years before European contact, most recently by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, who built the fortified village of Hochelaga at the base of Mount Royal -- a settlement of roughly 1,500 people that French explorer Jacques Cartier visited in 1535, naming the impassable rapids nearby "La Chine" in his frustrated search for a route to China. By the time Samuel de Champlain returned to the area in 1611 and built a trading post, Hochelaga had vanished entirely, likely emptied by disease or conflict. The permanent settlement came in 1642, when Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance founded the mission colony of Ville-Marie, intended as a base for converting the region's Indigenous peoples to Christianity.
Ville-Marie nearly didn't survive its first decades -- repeated Iroquois attacks during the Beaver Wars left the settlement fighting for its existence until reinforcements arrived from France in 1653, and open conflict didn't end until the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, a treaty between the French and 39 First Nations. The town took the name Montreal shortly after. The British conquest of 1760 ended French rule, formalized by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and the city briefly fell to American revolutionary forces in 1775 before the British retook it. Montreal only tamed Cartier's rapids in 1824, when the Lachine Canal finally opened a shipping route around them -- nearly three centuries after his failed attempt. Two 20th-century events reshaped the city's global profile: Expo 67, which set a single-day attendance record for a World's Fair, and the 1976 Summer Olympics.
Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve founded Ville-Marie and led it through its most precarious early years, while Jeanne Mance established its hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, one of North America's oldest, and is generally regarded as the colony's co-founder. Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain each opened the way for French settlement decades before Ville-Marie itself existed.
Montreal's English-French duality dates to the British conquest, deepened through the 19th century by waves of English and Irish immigration -- including many fleeing the Irish famine -- that built a genuinely bilingual working city rather than a purely French one. That balance has shifted over time, most notably during Quebec's Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, which strengthened French-Canadian identity across the province, but Montreal has kept a more mixed, cosmopolitan character than Quebec City or the rest of the province.
Modern Montreal trades on that duality -- a genuinely bilingual city with a globally respected food, arts, and festival scene, and a growing reputation as a technology and video game industry hub. Its underground city, built in response to the same winters that have always shaped daily life here, remains one of the largest of its kind anywhere, letting much of downtown function without ever stepping outside.