Land for sale in Montréal, Quebec

About Montréal

The area

The Montréal administrative region is the island of Montréal and a few smaller islands, bounded by the St. Lawrence to the south and the Rivière des Prairies to the north, with Mount Royal in the middle. It covers about 500 km² and had about 2,004,000 people in 2021. The City of Montréal (about 1,763,000), divided into 19 boroughs, shares island-wide services such as public transit and emergency services with 15 smaller municipalities through the agglomeration council. This is almost entirely urban land. The province's agricultural zone on the island is only about 2,000 ha, of which about a quarter is farmed, by fewer than 50 farms in 2023.

History

St. Lawrence Iroquoians lived on the island; Jacques Cartier visited their village of Hochelaga in 1535. Montréal, or Ville-Marie, was founded in 1642 as a missionary colony and soon became the centre of the French and then British fur trade. Work on the Lachine Canal began in 1825; canals and a deeper St. Lawrence channel made Montréal the region's main seaport, the Grand Trunk made it the hub of the railway system, and from the mid-1800s it grew into a major industrial city.

Services and access

The island has two university hospital networks, the CHUM and the McGill University Health Centre, whose Montreal General Hospital, founded in 1821, has an emergency department. Montréal-Trudeau International Airport in Dorval handles all passenger flights; Mirabel is for cargo and general aviation. Expressways built mostly in the 1960s cross the island and connect with intercity highways, and a Métro and bus system serves it.

Land and climate

Most farm income on the island comes from vegetables (about two-thirds), followed by ornamental horticulture, with greenhouses, vertical urban farms and urban beekeeping. At the west end, Cap-Saint-Jacques, a 330 ha nature park in the Grand parc de l'Ouest on Lac des Deux Montagnes and the Rivière des Prairies, keeps an organic farm and a sugar shack. The province lists access to growing space, given high land values, as a challenge for farming here.

Before you buy

In the City of Montréal, borough councils adopt the urban planning by-laws and handle permits; the other island municipalities, such as Senneville, keep their own zoning. Land in the agricultural zone falls under the Commission de protection du territoire agricole du Québec (CPTAQ), and non-farm uses there can need its authorization. Shoreline lots on the rivers and Lac des Deux Montagnes should be checked against the province's interactive map of flood zones and river mobility zones.

Sources

• Statistics Canada, 2021 Census population and dwelling counts (tables 98-10-0002, 98-10-0007)
• Ville de Montréal, agglomeration council
• Ville de Montréal, borough councils
• Ville de Montréal, Cap-Saint-Jacques
• MAPAQ, Profil régional de l'industrie bioalimentaire 2023
• The Canadian Encyclopedia, Montreal
• McGill University Health Centre, Montreal General Hospital
• CHUM
• Village de Senneville, zoning map
• CPTAQ
• Gouvernement du Québec, flood-zone maps in force

Written by AcreScout from the sources listed; facts checked September 30, 2026. Rules change: confirm anything that matters with the municipality.