Montreal is the most populous city in Quebec and the second-most populous city in all of Canada. In 1611, Samuel de Champlain established a fur trading post on the Island of Montreal (named for Mount Royal), and the first French settlers arrived on 17 May 1642, naming their settlement "Ville-Marie" after Mary. During the 1640s and 1650s, Montreal was repeatedly raided by the Iroquois, and the population was reduced to 50 in 1653. By 1685, Ville Marie was home to 600 colonists, and it became a center of the fur trade and for further exploration. In 1689, 1,500 English-allied Mohawk warriors attacked Lachine on the north end of the Island of Montreal during King William's War, massacring 250 civilians. The French later convinced the Mohawk to settle elsewhere, and Ville Marie was ruled as a French colony until 1760, when Great Britain captured the city during the Seven Years' War. In 1705, Ville Marie was renamed to Montreal, which became the official name of the city upon its incorporation in 1832. The population rose from 58,000 in 1852 to 267,000 in 1901, and the city itself expanded. During Prohibition, Montreal became a destination for American bootleggers, and Montreal's high unemployment was exacerbated by the Great Depression. By 1951, however, the population surpassed 1,000,000, and it competed with rising Toronto as the economic capital of the country. After the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959, it became possible for ships to bypass Montreal, which began to decline. The Quebecois independence crisis of the 1970s led to businesses moving out of Montreal, which experienced a slower rate of economic growth than other cities during the 1980s and 1990s. On 1 January 2002, Montreal annexed the 27 surrounding municipalities on the Island of Montreal, but this proved unpopular, as Parti Quebecois accused the government of deliberately merging Francophile Montreal with the English-speaking suburbs. In 2006, the number of the municipalities on the island returned to 15. During the 21st century, the city's economy and cultural landscape was revitalized, and Montreal came to have a population of 1,704,694 people in 2016, with an urban population of 3,519,595 and a metro population of 4,098,927.
Gallery[]
