Shopping

You can shop in Montréal until your feet swell and your eyes cross. Whether you view shopping as the focus of your travels or simply as a diversion, you won't be disappointed. Shopping ranks right up there with dining out as a prime activity among the natives. Most Montréalers are of French ancestry, after all, and seem to believe that impeccable taste bubbles through the Gallic gene pool. The city has produced a thriving fashion industry, from couture to ready-to-wear, with a history that reaches back to the earliest trade in furs and leather. There are more than 1,700 shops in the underground city alone, and many more than that at street level and above. It is unlikely that any reasonable consumer need -- or even outlandish fantasy -- cannot be met here.

The one dark cloud is that the Visitor Rebate Program, which used to allow nonresident visitors to apply for a rebate on tax they paid on most items purchased in Québec, was eliminated in April 2007. Additional details are available at www.cra-arc.gc.ca/visitors.

The Shopping Scene

When you're making purchases with a credit card, the charges are automatically converted at the going bank rate before appearing on your following monthly statement. In most cases, this is the best deal of all for visitors. Visa and MasterCard are the most popular credit cards in this part of Canada, while shops less frequently accept Discover. American Express is only accepted reluctantly and sometimes not at all.

Most stores are open from 9 or 10am to 6pm Monday through Wednesday, to 9pm on Thursday and Friday, and 9 or 10am to 5pm on Saturday. Many stores are now also open on Sunday from noon to 5pm.

The Best Buys

While not cheap, Canadian Inuit sculptures and 19th- to early-20th-century country furniture are handsome and authentic. Less expensive crafts than the intensely collected Inuit works are also available, including quilts, drawings, and carvings by Amerindian and other folk artists.

The province's daring clothing designers produce some appealing fashions at prices that are often reasonable. And while demand has diminished somewhat, superbly constructed furs and leather goods are high-ticket items.

Ice cider (cidre de glace) and ice wines made in Québec province from apples and grapes left on trees and vines after the first frost are inexpensive and delightfully unique products to bring home. They are sold in duty-free shops at the border in addition to the stores listed in this guide.

Most international clothing items are priced at approximately the same costs as in their countries of origin, including such big names as Burberry and Ralph Lauren. Exceptions are British products, including tweeds, porcelain, and glassware, which tend to cost less here.

The Best Shopping Areas

In downtown, rue Sherbrooke is a major shopping street, with international and domestic designers, luxury items such as furs and jewelry, art galleries, and the Holts department store. Rue Crescent, off of Sherbrooke, has a number of upscale boutiques scattered on its northern end, plus numerous cafés for a break from shopping.

Also downtown, rue Ste-Catherine is home to the city's top department stores and myriad satellite shops. Most of Montréal's big department stores were founded when Scottish, Irish, and English families dominated the city's mercantile class, and most of their names are identifiably English, albeit shorn of their apostrophes. The principal exception is La Baie, French for "The Bay," itself a shortened reference to an earlier name, the Hudson's Bay Company. Nearby, rue Peel is known for its men's fashions.

In Vieux-Montréal, the western end of rue St-Paul has a growing number of art galleries, clothing boutiques, and jewelry shops.

In Plateau Mont-Royal, boulevard St-Laurent sells everything from budget practicalities to off-the-wall handmade fashions. Look along avenue Laurier between boulevard St-Laurent and avenue de l'Epée for French boutiques, home furniture and accessories shops, and young Québécois designers. Rue St-Denis north of Sherbrooke has strings of shops filled with fun, funky items.

Shopping Complexes

A unique shopping opportunity in Montréal is the underground city, a warren of passageways connecting more than 1,700 shops in 10 shopping malls that have levels both above and below street level. Typical is the Complexe Desjardins (tel. 514/845-4636), a downtown destination bounded by rues Ste-Catherine, St-Urbain, and Jeanne-Mance and boulevard René-Lévesque. It has waterfalls and fountains, trees and hanging vines, music, lanes of shops going off in every direction, and elevators whisking people up to one of the four tall office towers.

You're also likely to end up in downtown's Place Ville-Marie, opposite Fairmont Le Reine Elizabeth hotel, between boulevard René-Lévesque and Cathcart (tel. 514/861-9393), which was Montréal's first major postwar shopping complex and is known locally simply as "PVM." It has more than 80 boutiques and eateries. A plaque honoring Vincent Ponte, who designed the underground city and died in 2006, is on the PVM esplanade.

The Montréal tourist office's Official Tourist Guide lists the other complexes at your service. The main thing to remember is that when you're in Montréal and you enter a street-level shopping emporium, it's likely that you'll be able to head to a lower level and connect to the maze of tunnels and shopping hallways that will lead you to another set of stores.