Mount Royal

I climbed Mount Royal for the first time via the Chemin Olmsted, the winding carriage path Frederick Law Olmsted designed deliberately to disorient you — no straight lines, no shortcuts, just switchbacks through maple and oak that make a small hill feel like a real ascent. Olmsted, who also did Central Park, apparently considered this his better work, and walking it in October with the leaves doing everything leaves are supposed to do, I believed him without needing convincing.

The Kondiaronk Belvedere at the top delivers the view every guidebook photograph promises — downtown Montreal’s cluster of towers, the St. Lawrence beyond, and on a clear day the shape of the Monteregian hills scattered across the horizon like the mountain has cousins it doesn’t visit often. I went up twice more after that first time, once at sunset when the belvedere filled with what looked like half the city’s population of street musicians and skateboarders, and once in January on snowshoes rented from a stand near Beaver Lake, which turned the same walk into something closer to genuine wilderness.

What I hadn’t expected was how much the mountain functions as civic infrastructure rather than scenic backdrop. Tam-Tams — the informal Sunday afternoon drum circle that gathers at the base of the George-Étienne Cartier monument from May through September — is not a tourist event, it’s a weekly ritual that seems to belong to the entire city, drummers and dancers and picnickers and dogs all occupying the same slope in a arrangement that looks chaotic and somehow isn’t. I sat at the edge of it for two hours one Sunday and never got bored, which is not something I say about drum circles generally.

The mountain also holds two cemeteries — Notre-Dame-des-Neiges and Mount Royal Cemetery, Catholic and Protestant respectively, a segregation that says something about how this city organized itself for centuries — and Beaver Lake, an artificial pond that becomes a skating rink in winter. I skated there on a Tuesday evening under floodlights with the city’s skyline glowing faintly through the trees, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes Montreal feel less like a city with a park and more like a forest with a city grown carefully around it.

When to go: May through September for Tam-Tams and full canopy green, October for the colour change on the Olmsted path, and January through March for cross-country skiing and skating at Beaver Lake if you don’t mind serious cold.