00:00It's absolutely wild to think that just below these city streets, in one of Canada's biggest cities, is a place as old as the Ice Age and buried in legend.
00:20After Toronto, Montreal has the biggest population of Italian Canadians in the country, and you'll find most of them living right here in St. Leonard.
00:27On the surface, St. Leonard's iconic duplexes and treeplexes decorate this part of the city.
00:35But beneath the busy streets of St. Leo is a secret that's almost 15,000 years old.
00:41Walking down this part of St. Leonard doesn't stand out in any way. I mean, this looks like a regular city street, but in this park is a system of underground caves so ancient they're unlike anything else in Montreal.
00:55The St. Leonard cavern made it into a local newspaper over 200 years ago, when a farmer came across an opening somewhere around this park in 1811.
01:06Some stories say that indigenous people used the cave as a home a long, long time ago. Other reports suggest that it was used as a weapons storage facility.
01:15Either way, one thing's for sure, this place is really, really old.
01:20All right, so how does a cave like this come to be? Well, about 15,000 years ago, this whole park was covered in a massive wall of ice, as big as something like you'd see on Game of Thrones.
01:29And in the process of the ice shifting, it tears open a hole in the rock, and you end up with a cave.
01:49Stepping inside, things quickly get real dark, so it's lights on.
02:08You might not be able to see it at first, but there are 450 million year old fossils spread all over this cavern. Seriously, they are everywhere.
02:17Proof that life once lived here, a long time ago.
02:21All right, now, it gets a lot more narrow the deeper you go. I mean, I'm barely a foot on either side of me, and I am surrounded by rock.
02:32And the fact that this is right here, in the middle of a city, is a little mind-blowing.
02:38If you are claustrophobic, I gotta say, this probably isn't for you.
02:46Now, this is one of the most narrow parts of the cavern, and if you're wondering just how dark it really is right here, check this out.
02:56It's dark.
03:01And you thought that was cool. We're about to go deeper.
03:08Now, originally, this cave was thought to be about 100 feet long, but in 2017, a massive breakthrough revealed that there's a lot more to this place than a lot of people thought.
03:26The second, deeper cave measures in at just over 800 meters. There's even a bed of water at the bottom, and despite that, there is no life down here whatsoever.
03:38Oh.
03:43Now, I've said this a ton of times before already, but this place just keeps getting narrower and narrower. However, just beyond this corridor, it's supposed to open up into something pretty special.
03:53I remember when I said there was no life down here, I might have spoken too soon. See all these little white dots? They're mushrooms, the kind you find in Demont-Berre.
04:10Now, this second, deeper cave isn't quite safe to check out just yet.
04:14But they do have plans to open it up to the public in the next couple years.
04:18Past this point, the water starts getting pretty deep, and I have no safety nets or security or wires or even a boat to get me across, so I'm going to have to call it a day.
04:31But as for the rest of the Saint-Lenard cave, you can actually come and check it out.
04:35Alright, let's get out of here.
04:39And there you have it, a 15,000-year-old cave buried just beneath the city streets in plain sight.
04:45That's it for today, but I will see you next time with another hidden place in Montreal.
05:05.
