Montréal (Anjou)

Anjou is one of the nineteen boroughs of the city of Montreal, in Quebec (Canada). Before the Quebec municipal reorganizations of 2002, it constituted a municipality, namely the city of Anjou, founded in 1956 from the parish of Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice.

Located at the intersection of two key traffic arteries of the Montreal metropolitan area – Highway 25 and the Metropolitan Highway (A-40) –, Anjou is a major commercial and industrial hub in the eastern part of the Montreal metropolitan area. In addition to the imposing Les Galeries d'Anjou shopping centre, it is home to an industrial park with over 600 businesses, a large retention lake, around which the Anjou-sur-le-Lac neighbourhood is built, and a golf club, all located in the northern part of the borough.

The name "Ville d'Anjou" to identify the municipality is relatively recent. When the parish municipality decided to change its municipal status to become a city in the fall of 1955, the municipal council of the time chose this name to designate the city.

Two hypotheses have been put forward to explain this choice. The first is that Marcel Sylvestre, a resident of Saint-Léonard-de-Port-Maurice, proposed the name Anjou after his time in this French region as a soldier during the Second World War. The second maintains that this name was chosen in homage to Anjou, a historic province of France, where the first settlers of New France came from, including one of the instigators of Ville-Marie, Jérôme Le Royer, Sieur de La Dauversière.