Home Destinations Canada Montréal Places to Explore Downtown and Chinatown

Downtown and Chinatown

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Places to Explore

1. Joe Beef
The best steak in town.
2. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal
Canada's oldest museum has a great collection.
3. Musée McCord de l'Histoire Canadienne
If it has anything to do with Montreal history, it's here.
4. St. Patrick's Basilica
The country's best Gothic Revival building.
The Underground City
Shop year-round at this underground mall.

Map of Downtown and Chinatown

Rue Ste-Catherine -- and the Métro line that runs under it -- is the main cord that binds together the disparate, sprawling neighborhoods that comprise Montréal's downtown, or centre-ville. It's a long, boisterous, sometimes seedy, and sometimes elegant street that runs from rue Claremont in Westmount to rue d'Iberville in the east end. The downtown stretch -- usually clogged with traffic and lined with department stores, boutiques, bars, restaurants, strip clubs, amusement arcades, and even a few churches -- is considerably shorter, running from avenue Atwater to boulevard St-Laurent, where downtown morphs into the Latin Quarter and the Village, the center of Montréal's gay and lesbian community.