Montreal — from a missionary outpost to the world's largest inland port

Montreal began on 17 May 1642 as Ville-Marie, a small fortified mission founded by Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, and roughly fifty French colonists on the site of Hochelaga, an Iroquoian village Jacques Cartier had visited a century earlier. The settlers named it not for the city but for Mount Royal, the triple-peaked hill Cartier himself had named after his patron, King Francis I. Nearly four centuries later, Montreal has grown into the second-largest French-speaking city in the world after Paris, its Old Port waterfront tracing almost exactly the same shoreline where those first colonists landed.

That waterfront now anchors the largest inland port in the world, reachable from the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence Seaway and its system of locks completed in 1959. Spanning the river just past the Old Port, the Jacques Cartier Bridge opened in 1930 as the Montreal Harbour Bridge, renamed three years later for the 400th anniversary of Cartier's voyage; in 2017 it became the world's first "connected" bridge, fitted with a dynamic LED lighting system that pulses with the rhythm of the city below.

What the three cameras show

Montreal beyond the webcams

Old Port (Vieux-Port): the historic waterfront where Ville-Marie was founded, now a public promenade with the observation tower and Clock Tower.

Mount Royal: the hill that gave the city its name, its park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the same landscape architect behind New York's Central Park.

Port of Montreal: Canada's largest container port, connected to the Atlantic and the Great Lakes via the St. Lawrence Seaway.

When to watch

Old Port, evening: for the Jacques Cartier Bridge's LED lighting system pulsing to life as dusk settles over the St. Lawrence.

Getting there: the Old Port observation tower sits at the Grand Quai, a short walk from Old Montreal; Trudeau Airport lies about 20km southwest of downtown, Quebec, Canada.