On any warm summer weekend, crowds pour across the Jacques Cartier Bridge to Parc Jean-Drapeau, a pair of islands lying just off the downtown core in the St. Lawrence River. Roughly four million people visit each year. An amusement park, several beaches, and a handful of museums draw visitors out across the water, especially in the warmer months, and together the islands form one of the largest green spaces close to the heart of the city. Their gardens and pathways, set against the soaring skyline downtown, offer a peaceful reprieve from the hustle and bustle of the streets.

Île Sainte-Hélène, the older of the two islands, was named by the explorer Samuel de Champlain in the early seventeenth century in honour of his wife, Hélène. For generations it remained a wooded natural island in the middle of the river. A stone fort and arsenal, raised by the British garrison in the 1820s, was among the first permanent structures on the island; portions of it still stand today and now house a museum of history. The island saw little further building until the middle of the twentieth century.