The Lafontaine Park is one of the oldest public parks of Montreal. Located in the middle of the chic Plateau Mount-Royal, it was named after Louis Hyppolite Lafontaine, a famous lawyer and Canadian senator who died in 1864.

Short history of Lafontaine Park.

In the beginning, the ground was integral part of the Logan farm. Logan was a rich baker who turns to manage successfully his profit into land. Thereafter in 1845, part of the farm is bough by the government of Canada to make a military exercises ground. This use lasted for 40 years. In the following years, Montreal’s politicians started to realize that Montreal lacked of parks and that great spaces near city center started to be rare. For this reason they decided to make from an old military field a beautiful public park.

Work to transform the place started in 1888 but several others modifications changed the appearance of the park across time: In 1900 they dug the two basins and in 1930 they added the fountain in the northern basin. During many years the “Jardin des Merveilles” a small urban zoo manages by the city since 1958 closed in 1989. The park is occupied by many buildings like the higher school of the Plateau and the house Calixa Lavallée. With time, many monuments have been added such as the one dedicated to Felix Leclerc and another dedicated to Dollard (1920).

Today the Lafontaine Park remains one of Montrealers’s favourite and his integral part of cultural life with amongst other things the open-air theatre, a space of diffusion for free event used by many festivals. The park will always remain the best places in Montreal to have a lunch or to skates on the lake during winter.

Here images of Lafontaine Park as of the buildings which surround it