Downtown

The heart of downtown—with department stores, boutiques, bars, restaurants, strip clubs, amusement arcades, theaters, cinemas, art galleries, bookstores, and even a few churches—runs from avenue Atwater to boulevard St-Laurent, where it gradually morphs into the Latin Quarter (Quartier Latin), and the Village, the center of Montréal's gay and lesbian community, sometimes referred to as "Gay Village."

The Latin Quarter, just south of the Plateau, has been drawing the young since the 1700s, when Université de Montréal students gave the area its name. When night falls the area is filled with omnilingual hordes—young and not so young, rich and poor, established and still studying.

The lively strip of rue Ste-Catherine running east of the Latin Quarter is the backbone of the Village. Its restaurants, antiques shops (on rue Amherst), and bars make it a popular destination for visitors of all persuasions. Downtown has its share of nightlife as well, and the action happens on such cross streets as rues Crescent, Bishop, de la Montagne, and Peel, which are packed with some of the district's best clubs, restaurants, and boutiques. If you're looking for a little nighttime excitement, you won't find a livelier block in the city than the stretch of rue Crescent between rue Ste-Catherine and boulevard de Maisonneuve.

Walk even farther north on rue Crescent to the lower slopes of Mont-Royal and you come to what was once the most exclusive neighborhood in Canada—the Golden Square Mile. During the boom years of the mid-1800s, baronial homes covered the mountain north of rue Sherbrooke. Many are gone, replaced by high-rises or modern town houses, but there are still plenty of architectural treasures to admire, even if most of them are now foreign consulates or university institutes.

Sandwiched between the downtown and the Old City is bustling Chinatown, with a pedestrian street closed to traffic lined with restaurants and gift shops, as well as markets selling everything from hard-to-find Asian produce to dim sum.

And underneath it all—the entire downtown area and then some—is Montréal's Underground City, a vast network of more or less anything you'd find on the street above.