Geography
The 3.74 km² island is part of the Hochelaga Archipelago in the St. Lawrence River. It is located immediately southeast of the Island of Montreal, from which it is separated by a narrow channel, and north of the La Prairie Basin.
The island is noted for its parks and scenery including West Vancouver Park which overlooks the Saint Lawrence River. The 26-hectare Domaine Saint-Paul natural woodland in the southern part of the island, a crucial nesting area for more than a hundred species of birds, is one of the last remaining natural woodlands in southern Montreal. It has been progressively eroded by development. The woodland surrounds an artificial lake called Lac des Battures. This lake was actually created by accident as parts of the river known as "water lots" became landlocked during landfill operations in the 60's and 70's. Most of this landfill came from the excavation of Montreal's underground Metro system in the mid-1960s. That part of the Island was subject to annual floods caused by spring runoff. The resulting dykes and fill allowed an additional few million square feet to be used for development as well as a golf course.
Read more about this topic: Nuns' Island
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)