Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, is a suburban city located approximately 45 kilometres northwest of Montreal on the Rivière du Nord. With a population of 80,213 as of 2021, it forms part of the North Shore sector of Greater Montreal. The city serves as a gateway to the Laurentian Mountains and its resorts via the Autoroute des Laurentides. The town is named after Saint Jerome, a church father renowned for translating the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin, known as the Vulgate.
The territory where Saint-Jérôme now stands was granted in 1752 by the marquis de la Jonquière, governor of New France, as the seignory of Augmentation des Mille-Iles. From the 1760s to the 1840s, the seignory was owned by the Dumont and Lefebvre de Bellefeuille families, living in the town of Saint-Eustache, 25 kilometers to the south. The emerging town was then known as Dumontville.
The Catholic parish of Saint-Jérôme was constituted on November 15, 1834, and the village was constituted on July 1, 1845, by governor Metcalfe. François-Xavier-Antoine Labelle, a Roman Catholic priest who was the great "colonizer" of the North of Montreal, was in charge of the pastoral administration of Saint-Jérôme from 1868 until his death in 1891. Eight years after his arrival, he had a railway built linking Saint-Jérôme and Montreal.
In 2002, Saint-Jérôme was amalgamated with the municipalities of Bellefeuille, Saint-Antoine, and Lafontaine. Today, Saint-Jérôme is the seat of the judicial district of Terrebonne.
According to the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Saint-Jérôme had a population of 80,213 living in 37,371 of its 38,776 total private dwellings, a change of 7.9% from its 2016 population of 74,346. The city is mostly made up of European descents, with 91.8% of the population identifying as White. The largest non-Christian religion in Saint-Jérôme is Islam, accounting for 1.9% of the population.
Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, is home to a variety of attractions. These include the Roman Catholic cathedral, which houses a small museum, the Vieux-Palais modern art museum and public library, and the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides. The city also boasts a statue of Antoine Labelle, several summer festivals, the Carrefour du Nord regional shopping mall, and the Melançon Arena, an indoor arena.
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Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, has been twinned with Lisieux, France, since May 2010.
