ongueuil begins with 50 arpents of river frontage granted in 1657 to Charles Le Moyne, facing the island of Montreal. He named the estate after his mother's village in Normandy. Forty-three years later Louis XIV raised the seigneury to a barony — a distinction unique in New France — and the title, recognized by Queen Victoria in 1880, remains the only French noble title still active in Canada.
What survives of that history is Vieux-Longueuil: a grid of short streets around the Saint-Antoine-de-Padoue co-cathedral, terrasses along rue Saint-Charles, the river a block away and a village tempo you would never guess from the highway. The rest of the city — Quebec's fifth-largest, with 254,000 residents — spreads between Saint-Hubert and Greenfield Park, one of the few boroughs where English is still commonly heard in shops.
Longueuil lives pressed against Montreal without depending on it. The yellow line, dug for Expo 67, puts downtown four minutes away by metro. And since June 2026, Montreal Metropolitan Airport has been sending flights to Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto out of a Saint-Hubert runway that mostly served flight schools. In between: Parc Michel-Chartrand and its white-tailed deer, and a bike path along the river all the way to the Boucherville islands.