The Underground City is the connected network of passages, concourses and shopping levels beneath central Montreal — officially RÉSO since 2004, and la ville souterraine in French. It runs to some thirty-two kilometres and holds the Guinness record for the largest pedestrian network of its kind.
It is genuinely useful between December and March. It is not, as older accounts suggest, a shopping destination in its own right, and the department store that anchored it has gone.
The first link was made in 1962, when Place Ville Marie was built over the open railway cutting leading into Central Station and a shopping concourse was put underneath it, connecting the trains to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. The architects were from I. M. Pei's office, and the tower is International Style rather than Bauhaus, whatever older accounts call it.
When the Metro opened in 1966 the principle was already established, and the network grew outwards from there for sixty years — not to a plan, but because each new tower downtown found it worth connecting to the one next door.
Older accounts describe "hundreds of stores", which undersells it, and then claim a specific daily footfall, which has long since stopped being accurate. The count of connected buildings is quoted confidently in a great many guides and is not actually published anywhere reliable.
This is the part of the network most in need of correction, because older accounts send visitors to three things that no longer exist.
Les Cours Mont-Royal needs a warning rather than a recommendation. Most of its units are now closed and it has been described in the local press as a shell of its former self. A handful of things survive, including a free exhibition of dressed dolls that has acquired a cult following, but anyone going for the shops will find very few.
Older accounts promise hundreds of skylights bringing daylight below street level across the whole complex. That is true of particular buildings — the reworked Esplanade at Place Ville Marie has a very large glass pavilion over its food hall, and the Eaton Centre and the 1000 atrium are both lit from above — but it is not a property of the network. A good deal of it is ordinary lit corridor, and it is easy to lose any sense of direction.
It does not stay open at night. Most of the network is passable while the Metro runs, roughly from half past five in the morning until one, but individual sections follow the opening hours of the buildings they belong to, so a through-route that worked in the afternoon may be shut in the evening. It is not a late-night short cut.
Older accounts recommend "a Quebec specialty — french fries, brown gravy and cheese curd" without ever naming it. It is poutine, it is everywhere in the food courts down here, and it is considerably better from a proper counter than from a food-court kiosk.
The network threads between the Metro's orange and green lines across the centre, and the useful stations are Bonaventure, McGill, Peel and Place-des-Arts. The REM light rail, which opened in stages from 2023 and reached McGill in November 2025, connects into it at both McGill and Central Station; a direct pedestrian link between Bonaventure and Central Station opened in 2024. The REM does not yet reach the airport — that branch is still to come. General practicalities for the city are on the Montreal page.