Compact, walkable and attractive, Ste. Anne de Bellevue is one of the nicest old towns in suburban Montreal. It’s also about as far west as you can go in Montreal before falling off the island, which might as well be the edge of the earth, as far as I’m concerned. (I crossed the Champlain Bridge once but everything after that is a blank.) It takes about thirty minutes to get there by train from Central Lucien L’Allier Station, an hour from Lionel-Groulx metro on the 211 bus and anywhere from half an hour to an hour by car from downtown, depending on traffic.
Founded in 1701, Ste. Anne sits along a channel connecting Lake St. Louis with the Lake of Two Mountains. A canal was built along its waterfront in 1843, making the town an important point along the Montreal-Ottawa-Kingston shipping route, and the Canadian Pacific Railway passed through the town in 1887, linking it to Montreal and Ottawa. McGill University opened Macdonald College, an agricultural school, on the eastern edge of the town in 1907.
Today, Ste. Anne de Bellevue is home to a little over 5,000 people. It’s one of the more bilingual towns on the West Island, with a 40/40 split between anglophones and francophones, and it makes for a great daytrip if you have a sunny afternoon to kill.
Ste. Anne Street is the town’s main drag. It’s narrow and pleasant, lined by a mix of everyday businesses like pharmacies and dépanneurs as well as lots of cafés, restaurants and bars, many with large terraces that look out over the water. (Check out Herb’s, a small café just past the town hall, for a great lunch.) As we reported in the fall, it’s about to undergo some major renovations.
Along the water, there’s a nice boardwalk with views of the rail and highway bridges linking Montreal with Île Perrot.
Ste. Anne’s streets are narrow, which makes for a pleasant walking environment. I found this tree and lamppost on a small street about two blocks from the lake. It makes room for new street furniture without sacrificing parking spots, which strikes me as a decent compromise.
The words “Évacué au lac – Drains to Lake,” accompanied by the image of a fish, were stencilled next to sewer grates throughout town. Is this an effort by Ste. Anne’s town hall to raise environmental awareness?
Check out more photos of Ste. Anne de Bellevue here.
2 comments
The fish stencils are mostly to remind residents that the sewer and household waste water are treated differently. Many people don’t think about that when they’re, say, washing their cars and the soap gets carried down the storm drain directly into the lake.
And the train comes from Lucien L’Allier station (or Windsor Station, if you’re old), not Central Station.
As wonderful a village now as it was when I lived there in the 50’s. Small, quiet, picturesque … a great place to live!