Mount Royal Cemetery, Montréal, Montreal County, Quebec

Mount Royal Cemetery in Montréal was founded in 1852, and was designated a National Historic Site in 2002. Its 165 acres are located on the north slope of Mount Royal.

In the late 1840s Montréal's graveyards were rapidly filling, so the trustees of the Protestant Burial Ground began to promote the idea of building a new non-denominational cemetery well outside the city. The trustees sought design advice from American specialists, and the resulting cemetery was based on that of Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts — a grandiose entrance area and a romantic landscape of large green spaces filled with extravagant urns and crosses, true to the Victorian ideal of the time. The crematorium, built in 1901, was paid for by a donation from Sir William Macdonald of the Macdonald tobacco empire, and was for many years the only crematorium in Canada.

John Abbott, Canadian Prime Minister, is buried in Mount Royal Cemetery; he was born on March 12, 1821 in Saint-André-Est, Quebec and died on October 30, 1893 in Montréal, Quebec.

Historical guided tours are available to learn about the lives of some of the other notable figures buried in Mount Royal Cemetery.

Mount Royal Cemetery · Camillien-Houde Parkway or de la Forêt Road · Montréal (Québec) H2V 2P9 · Canada · (514) 279-7358.