00:00It's absolutely wild to think that just below these city streets, in one of Canada's biggest
00:06cities, is a place as old as the ice age and buried in legend.
00:19After Toronto, Montreal has the biggest population of Italian Canadians in the country,
00:24and you'll find most of them living right here in Saint-Leonard.
00:27On the surface, Saint-Leonard's iconic duplexes and triplexes decorate this part of the city.
00:35But beneath the busy streets of Saint-Leo is a secret that's almost 15,000 years old.
00:41Walking down this part of Saint-Leonard doesn't stand out in any way. I mean,
00:45this looks like a regular city street, but in this park is a system of underground caves
00:51so ancient they're unlike anything else in Montreal.
00:54The Saint-Leonard Cavern made it into a local newspaper over 200 years ago,
00:59when 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.
01:11Other 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?
01:22Well, about 15,000 years ago, this whole park was covered in a massive wall of ice,
01:26as big as something like you'd see on Game of Thrones.
01:28And in the process of the ice shifting, it tears open a hole in the rock,
01:33and you end up with a cave.
01:54Stepping inside, things quickly get real dark, so it's lights on.
01:59You might not be able to see it at first, but there are 450 million year old fossils
02:12spread all over this cavern. Seriously, they are everywhere.
02:17Proof that life once lived here, a long time ago.
02:19All right, now it gets a lot more narrow the deeper you go.
02:26I 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.
02:39If you are claustrophobic, I gotta say, this probably isn't for you.
02:44Now, this is one of the most narrow parts of the cavern, and if you're wondering just how dark
02:51it really is right here, check this out.
02:57It's dark.
03:01You thought that was cool. We're about to go deeper.
03:03Now, originally, this cave was thought to be about 100 feet long, but in 2017,
03:18massive breakthrough revealed that there's a lot more in this place than a lot of people thought.
03:25The second, deeper cave measures in at just over 800 meters.
03:30There's even a bed of water at the bottom, and despite that, there is no life down here whatsoever.
03:42Now, I've said this a ton of times before already, but this place just keeps getting narrower and
03:47narrower. However, just beyond this corridor, it's supposed to open up into something pretty special.
04:01I remember when I said there was no life down here. I might have spoken too soon.
04:04See all these little white dots? They're mushrooms. The kind you find in Demont-Berre.
04:10The second, deeper cave isn't quite safe to check out just yet, but they do have plans to open it
04:23up to the public in the next couple years. Past this point, the water starts getting pretty deep,
04:28and I have no safety nets or security or wires or even a boat to get me across, so I'm going to have to
04:33call it a day. But as for the rest of the St. Leon Arcade, you can actually come and check it out
04:44right now. All right, let's get out of here.
04:50And there you have it, a 15,000-year-old cave buried just beneath the city streets in plain sight.
04:55That's it for today, but I will see you next time with another hidden place in Montreal.
05:03We'll see you next time.
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