Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery

This guide to Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery in Montreal opens with the price of a single burial plot on this hillside, then traces how that market began: an 1853 city ban on downtown burials that forced the Fabrique Notre-Dame to buy farmland on Mount Royal from a doctor named Beaubien. You'll hear about Jane Gilroy, an Irish woman of thirty-five buried here first in 1855, and the ten mausoleums the parish built over the following century, one holding a full-size copy of Michelangelo's Pietà. Walk the winding lanes to see how a burial ban became Canada's largest cemetery.