Season Guide - Canada - Hilton Racing

Most visitors on a pit-stop visit head to the Old Town. Handsome warehouses, once full of fur timber, are now lofts and lounge bars. Gift shops sell moose dolls and Mountie hats. It’s fun, tourist friendly and packed with hostelries, from fine restaurants to raucous bars. I lunched on roast duck and white wine sauce at Club Chasse et Peche – Montreal’s gastro-culture is an alluring mix of France and North America - before walking the Old Town’s main drag, rue St Paul, and emerging in the central Place Jacques Cartier, with its own Nelson’s column, a potential eyesore to Quebec’s Francophone majority. A short hop from the Old Town is the Point-a-Calliere Museum of Archeology and History, an entertaining romp through Montreal’s history in a landmark building, put up to commemorate the city’s 350th birthday in 1992. From the museums viewing platform. I gazed over the wide Lawrence River – Montreal’s raison d’etre – to the islands constructed for the 1967 World Fair, which bequeathed a number of attractions, including the city’s Formula One track.

From the museum, it’s a short walk to the Old Port now a thronged promenade. It’s a great place to feel the warm Montreal ambience and watch the eccentric waterside pageant of cyclists, rollerbladers and golfcarts. I spent an amusing hour on a hired Segway, wobbling past book stalls, ice-cream parlours and the big top of Cirque du Soleil.

Ah, yes as well as being a festival town, Montreal is also the world capital of circus, Cirque du Soleil was started here in 1984 by busker Guy Laliberte, whose idea was a circus with acrobatics but no animals. The suburb of Jarry now houses Cirque’s HQ and circus school.

The circus quarter is still maturing but its close to Montreal’s second great neighbourhood a 19th century grid dedicated to shopping, drinking and gastronomy, called Le Plateau-Mont-Royal. I nosed throughMont Royal Avenue’s one-off boutiques before supper in LePied de Cochon, where the signature dish is ‘duck in a can’ yeas its duck baked in a tin can. Even the food in Montreal is funny.

Near Le Plateau-Mont-Royal is the Golden Square Mile, which backs onto the massive basilica of St Joseph’s Oratory, offering another great Montreal view ‘Pilots flying to New York were told to Turn left at Joe’s house’ a guide told me. Only a little less startling is Montreal’s Casino, housed in the futuristic glory of the Expo’s old French Pavilion.

The Casino isn’t the only space-age building here. The astonishing Olympic Stadium from 1976, by French architect Roger Taillibert looks like it dropped in from the movie Barbarella. I took the funicular up the huge, curved Observatory and pondered the sheer sense of space in Montreal. Locals still grumble about the cost, but the impression left is simple, time after time. Montreal rises to the occasion.