Where to Stay in Laval, Québec

What is Laval known for?

An island holds the whole city. Île Jésus sits between Montreal and the country north of it, and Laval covers almost all of that island along with smaller ones nearby, which makes water the boundary on every side. Place Bell and the Cosmodome pull the visitors. The Autoroute 15 corridor and the southeast shore carry most of the city's activity, facing Montreal across the Rivière des Prairies.

What are the main landmarks in Laval?

The Cosmodome is the odd one. A space science centre sits beside the Armand Frappier Museum, while Place Bell and the Colisée de Laval are the larger named venues. Old houses carry family names.

Maison Pierre-Paré, Maison Charbonneau, Maison Joseph-Labelle, Maison Therrien, and Maison André-Benjamin-Papineau survive from the villages that preceded the city, and the Église de Sainte-Rose-de-Lima marks the parish life among them. The Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary, its Main Cellblock, and the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary Towers stand apart from all of it.

What is the history of Laval?

The city is younger than its buildings. Laval carries a founding year of 1965, but Maison Pierre-Paré, Maison Charbonneau, Maison André-Benjamin-Papineau, and the Église de Sainte-Rose-de-Lima all belong to the village landscape that stood on Île Jésus long before any single municipality existed. Île Jésus lies between the Rivière des Prairies and the water on its far side, which made it farm country in reach of Montreal for generations before the merger. Fourteen of them were folded together.

That amalgamation produced one municipality covering nearly the whole island, which is why the city keeps several old cores instead of a single historic centre, each with its own church and its own surviving houses. Institutions came before the suburb. The Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary stands with its Main Cellblock and the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary Towers, a prison complex of its own scale among the island's older structures.

Montreal did the rest. Growth along the Autoroute 15 corridor turned the southeast of Île Jésus into the largest suburb of Greater Montreal, while the north and west stayed rural, and that split still governs how the city reads on the ground. The Cosmodome and the Armand Frappier Museum belong to the later civic build, added once the island had a city government of its own.

Where is Laval?

Water surrounds Laval completely. The city occupies Île Jésus and a scatter of smaller islands north of Montreal, with the Rivière des Prairies dividing it from the larger island across the southeast shore. Most of the ground stays rural.

Built-up land follows the Autoroute 15 corridor and the southeastern coast, leaving farmland over much of the rest of the island, so the city's density falls off sharply away from that edge.

What is the climate of Laval?

The rivers ring the island but do little. Île Jésus sits far from any ocean, so the temperate year swings between hard winter cold with lasting snow and a humid warm stretch through July and August, the same pattern Montreal keeps across the Rivière des Prairies. Being an island changes nothing here. The channels are too narrow to hold heat or cool the air the way a sea does, which is why Laval's weather reads as continental rather than maritime.

How do you get to Laval?

Autoroute 15 runs the length of it. That road carries the main approach from Montreal, crossing the Rivière des Prairies onto Île Jésus and continuing north through the corridor where most of Laval's built-up ground lies. A car helps everywhere else.

The old village centres, the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary, and the farm country beyond the corridor sit well apart from one another across an island this wide, and Greater Montreal's network is what ties them to the rest of Québec.