Quebéc City, the continent’s only walled city, is North America’s most fascinating urban area. Steeped in myth and romance, Québec city has experienced invasion, conquest, and political turmoil. Evoked as “the Gibraltar of America” by nineteenth century tourists seeking sublime and picturesque scenery, the old city is today celebrated by the United Nations (UNESCO) as a World Heritage Site. The historic district covers 135 hectares. With its harbour sector, religious institutions, and civil and military installations, it shares world status with only one other North American historic city centre, Mexico City, and with such other old cities as Florence, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Damascus, Venice, Dubrovnik, Berne, Bath, Lima, Cracow, Quito, Toledo, Rome, and Warsaw.
 

In 1985, UNESCO placed historic Québec City on the prestigious World Heritage List, the only North American urban site to earn this international recognition. Québec City’s Lower Town, viewed here, was the site of Champlain’s Abitation, 1608. Narrow streets, stone buildings dating back to the 1600s, public squares, museums, intimate cafés, and one-of-a-kind boutiques give this heritage quarter a medieval character unique in North America. [Photo, courtesy Carl E. Hiebert]

Jacques Cartier first explored the heights of Québec in 1535. In the general vicinity he found an Iroquoian village named Stadacona. In 1608, by the time Samuel de Champlain constructed the Abitation which indelibly marked the founding of New France in America, the village had disappeared. Located at a point alongside the St. Lawrence River where it narrows to 1 km,the town enjoyed the role of being an Atlantic seaport as well as an interior corridor to the Great Lakes watershed and beyond. The massive protruding Cap-aux-Diamants to this day dominates a riverscape and landscape that is compelling, strategic, and Christmas card picturesque.

Although it was captured by New England merchants in 1629 and the British on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, it was successfully defended against an invasion of American rebels in 1775. Throughout these years, Québec nevertheless sustained acentral military, administrative, cultural, and religious role in New France. The population numbered only 8,000 in 1760, but a century later it had risen to 60,000. The British invasion had infused the city with English-speaking traders and merchants who capitalized on the burgeoning lumber trade. However, the decline of preferential trade duties with Great Britain, the increasing role of interior trade with the United States, and the financial clout of upstream Montréal eclipsed Québec City’s once dominant role on the St. Lawrence. A provincial capital since 1867, the city has amalgamated with many of its outlying municipalities, to form, today, a sprawling metropolitan area.
 

Built in 1892 on the site of Château St.-Louis (1647) to resemble an European castle, Château Frontenac is one of Québec City’s best-known and most visible landmarks. Dominating Place d’Armes, a large square in Upper Town used for military drills and parades during the French regime, this majestic sentinel overlooking the St. Lawrence River, 100 meters below, has hosted kings, queens, and heads of state. [Photo, courtesy Carl E. Hiebert]

As the cradle of French civilization in North America, Québec, through four centuries of urban evolution, has sustained anauthentic continuity. In its residences, churches, and institutions, the city cherishes some of Canada’s most important landmarks; these include the Old Port, Artillery Park, the St. Louis Gate, the Ursuline Convent, Place Royale, the Plains of Abraham, the Citadel, Dufferin Terrace, Québec Bridge, the Colisée, and, on the skyline, the majestic Château Frontenac.
 

Port Saint-Jean is one of several walled entrances into historic Québec City, the only fortified city north of Mexico. During Québec’s Winter Carnival, each February, the popular mascot figure Bonhomme appears everywhere. [Photo, courtesy Québec Tourism/photographer, Luc-Antoine Courturier]

Québec has been the subject of many artistic interpretations and literary descriptions. Observing the exhilarating panorama from the citadel, Charles Dickens wrote:

The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and forest, mountain height and water, which lies stretched out before the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of gables, roofs and chimney tops, in the old hilly town immediately at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the sunlight, and the tiny ships from below the Rock from which you gaze, whose distant rigging looks like spider’s webs against the light...forms one of the brightest and most enchanting pictures the eye can rest upon.

The cradle of French civilization in North America, Québec City historically consists of Upper and Lower Town quarters. Although much of Lower Town was destroyed by the great fire of 1682, by bombardment in the seige of 1759, and by neglect over the centuries, today its focal point is Place Royale where the humble Notre Dame des Victoires, viewed here, built in 1688, stands proudly refurbished on the site of Champlain’s original Abitation. Some 60 buildings in the general area have recently been restored. In the centre of Québec City’s oldest public square stands a bust of Louis XIV, a reminder of Québec’s royal heritage. [Photo, courtesy Québec Tourism/photographer Jacques Boudreau]

Mazo de la Roche wrote in 1944:

Yet what traveller can name a city with a more romantic past or a more noble situation? It is a walled city. Eventhough some of the walls are gone, there still remain the massive gates to mark where they stood. The dignity, the character, the aloofness of the walled city remain. It stands on its mighty rock above the moving tides of the St.Lawrence, fortified, the dark Laurentians rising behind it, and, as though one great river were not enough to guard it, there flows on its northern side the St. Charles. Today it stands in its calm and its recollections, yet filled with active toil, a town of Medieval France in the New World.

Larry Turner