Downtown and RESO Underground City Small-Group Walking Tour Montreal

The RESO underground city of Montreal

The RESO is the name locals give to Montreal's underground city, a network of more than 30 kilometres of tunnels, halls and galleries beneath downtown that connects office towers, shopping centres, hotels, universities, concert halls and ten metro stations. It began in 1962 with the plaza under Place Ville-Marie and grew through the years of Expo 67 and the 1976 Olympics, and today tens of thousands of people use it every day to cross the city centre without stepping into the snow. A Montreal underground city tour is the only sensible way to understand it, because the passages are not signposted as a single attraction and most visitors see only a mall or two.

This guided walk follows a route through the most striking sections, from polished stone corridors to atriums flooded with daylight, and explains how the network was planned, financed and stitched together. It is the classic answer to what to do in Montreal in winter, but the indoor sections are just as pleasant in summer heat.

McGill College Avenue and Place Ville-Marie

The walk starts on McGill College Avenue, the wide boulevard that frames the best downtown view in the city: looking north, the avenue lines up on Mount Royal and the cross on its summit, and in the foreground stands The Ring, a tall circular steel sculpture that turns the view into a picture. A few steps south is Place Ville-Marie, the cross-shaped office tower of 1962 whose underground shopping plaza was the first piece of the RESO and the origin of the whole idea of a city beneath the city.

Your guide explains how the tower's architects connected the plaza to the Central Station and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel site, creating the first weather-proof link that others then copied. The esplanade above has been remodelled with a glass pavilion and a lawn, and the view of the tower from here is a favourite photo stop on any downtown Montreal tour.

Sainte-Catherine Street, Phillips Square and Christ Church Cathedral

Sainte-Catherine Street is Montreal's main commercial artery, a long run of department stores, boutiques, cafés and theatres that stays lively in every season, and the walk follows a stretch of it on the surface. Phillips Square, with its central statue and the old Birks building on one corner, is one of the few open squares downtown and a good spot to understand how the surface streets sit above the passages below. Just across the street rises Christ Church Cathedral, the Anglican cathedral of Montreal, a neo-Gothic church completed in 1859.

The cathedral is famous for what happened in the 1980s: to pay for its upkeep, the church leased the ground beneath it and the whole building was supported on stilts while a shopping level and an office tower were built underneath. Your guide shows you where the church sits above the mall and the Eaton Centre, a detail most shoppers never notice.

Palais des congrès and the Lipstick Forest

The Palais des congrès is Montreal's convention centre, and its 2002 extension gave the city one of its most photographed walls: a facade of 332 glass panels in pink, yellow, green, blue and orange that turns the hall inside into a kaleidoscope when the sun shines through. The underground route reaches the Palais through the RESO, and inside you walk among the Lipstick Forest, an installation of 52 concrete tree trunks painted bright pink, cast from real trees on Mount Royal. It is a popular stop for photographs and a good example of the public art hidden along the passages.

Nearby the route passes the World Trade Centre Montréal, a glass-roofed atrium built over an old lane, where a section of the Berlin Wall given to the city in 1992 stands on display. From here it is only a few steps to the edge of Chinatown, where the character of the streets changes in a moment.

Place des Arts and the Quartier des Spectacles

The walk also touches the Quartier des Spectacles, Montreal's entertainment district, centred on Place des Arts, the complex of concert halls and theatres that hosts the symphony, the opera and the big summer festivals. The underground passages link Place des Arts to the metro and to the surrounding halls, so performers and audiences can move between them without going outside in February. Above ground, the square and its fountains, red-marked pavements and festival stages show how the district was redesigned in the last two decades.

Your guide uses this stretch to explain how the RESO evolved beyond shopping into a cultural and civic network, and how the Montreal metro, with its rubber-tyred trains, is integrated into the whole. The tour ends after about two hours and roughly 4 kilometres of walking, with the printed list of local favourites in your hand.