Ville-Marie, Montreal
borough in downtown Montreal, Quebec

Ville-Marie (French pronunciation: [vil maʁi]) is the name of a borough (arrondissement) in the centre of Montreal, Quebec. The borough is named after Fort Ville-Marie, the French settlement that would later become Montreal (now Old Montreal), which was located within the present-day borough. Old Montreal is a National Historic Site of Canada.
The borough comprises all of downtown Montreal, including the Quartier des spectacles; Old Montreal and the Old Port; the Centre-Sud area; most of Mount Royal Park as well as Saint Helen's Island and Île Notre-Dame.
In 2016, it had a population of 104,944 and an area of 16.5 square kilometres (6.4 mi2).
Geography
It is bordered by the city of Westmount (along Atwater Avenue) to the west and the boroughs of Le Sud-Ouest (along the Autoroute Ville-Marie, Guy and Notre-Dame streets, and the Bonaventure Autoroute) to the southwest, Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (along the CP rail lines) to the east, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal (along Sherbrooke, University streets, and Pine and Park avenues) to the northeast, and Outremont and Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (along the border of Mount Royal Park) to the north. It is bounded on the south by the Saint Lawrence River.
Government
Municipal
As of 2009, the office of borough mayor, rather than being elected by the borough's citizens, is held ex officio by the mayor of Montreal. Also, two of the members of the borough council are city councillors from other boroughs, chosen by the mayor.
Rather than a dedicated borough hall, the borough's offices and council chambers are located in the Place Dupuis office tower at 800 De Maisonneuve Boulevard East.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ville-Marie, Montreal” is borough in downtown Montreal, Quebec. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ville-Marie, Montreal and borough, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “borough in downtown Montreal, Quebec” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q247123. Authority coordinates are 45.509, -73.563. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016 and 2009.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ville-Marie, Montreal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.