Pointe-à-Callière
Montreal's archaeology and history museum, built over the excavated remains of the city's birthplace.
Pointe-à-Callière opened in May 1992 to mark the 350th anniversary of Montreal's founding. It stands on the narrow spit of land where Ville-Marie was established in 1642, and its central idea is to display the site itself: visitors descend beneath the modern pavilions into an archaeological crypt containing the city's first Catholic cemetery, foundation walls, and the stone-vaulted collector sewer built over the Little Saint-Pierre River in the 1830s.
The complex has grown into a group of linked buildings spread across Old Montreal, among them the Éperon building designed by Dan S. Hanganu, the restored Mariners' House, the Youville Pumping Station and the Fort Ville-Marie pavilion opened in 2017. Together they hold permanent displays on Montreal's Indigenous, French and British periods, and the museum mounts three or four temporary exhibitions each year, often drawing on loans from archaeological collections abroad.
Highlights
- Archaeological crypt beneath the museum showing the 1642 settlement
- Walkable section of the 1830s William collector sewer
- Fort Ville-Marie pavilion over the original fort site
- Rooftop lookout over the Old Port and Place Royale
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