It is not hard to find a Paris-caliber meal –from mousse de foie de volaille to mouse au chocolat—for what you’d pay for hors d’oeuvres and Perrier on Boulevard Montparnasse.  What would buy you peeling wallpaper and the smell of stale Gitanes on the Left Bank of Paris gets you an airy room in a lovely hotel in the second largest French-speaking city in the world.  To top it off, Montreal has made a tradition of offering its considerable cultural life to its citizens for free or next to nothing.

To get around this city, the best thing you can do is do it on foot, but the seasons will determine where you go –and what you strap onto your feet.  In spring and summer, every corner of the city is good for endless strolling, with streets like Prince Arthur and Saint Dennis serving as hubs for street performers.  Between December and the middle of March, when snow and ice can make walking a chore, you might want to trade your shoes for skis or skates and explore the city’s parks. 

For those who love skating, it is free at Lafontaine Park (as well as 65 other rinks in the city) until 10 p.m; the curving ice meanders below trees hung with lanterns. (Ice skates can be rented for under US$7).  You can ski for free at Mont-Royal Park, where 15 miles of cross-country trails wend around the 764-foot-tall mountain that rises over the city center.

A number of Montreal’s spectacular sites –its churches—are impermeable to the seasons, and admission cost no more than the price of a candle.   The startlingly ornate pine-and-walnut interior of the Old Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica houses a small museum and an organ whose 6,772 pipes soar toward turquoise vaults studded with gold-leaf fleur-de-lis.  The evening concert that the Montreal Symphony Orchestra performs in the Basilica every July is free, and it’s worth preserving a place in advance to hear Mozart performed in this 1829 masterpiece of the Gothic Revival.

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