Three days in Quebec City: still walled, still French, four hundred years on
Two nights inside the fortifications: the terrace and the cathedral on the first evening, the lower town and the oldest square in Canada on the second day, and the citadel on the last morning.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Quebec City
- Places
- 8 across 3 days
Samuel de Champlain put a trading post on this cliff in 1608 because the St Lawrence narrows here to about a kilometre, which meant that whoever held the headland held the river and therefore the interior of the continent. The name comes from an Algonquian word meaning roughly where the river narrows, and the geography that made it worth fortifying is exactly what makes it worth looking at now.
Quebec spent a century and a half as the capital of New France, lost a battle on the fields behind the walls in 1759 that decided who would run North America, and then, unusually, was not knocked down and rebuilt. The old town is a UNESCO site and one of only three walled cities left in the Americas, the other two being in Mexico and Puerto Rico.
It is small. Upper Town and Lower Town together are about a square kilometre, joined by a staircase and a funicular, and three days is genuinely enough to see it properly and still spend an afternoon doing nothing. Do not treat it as a day trip from Montreal. The evenings, once the coach parties have gone, are the best part.
Highlights
- A boardwalk on the cliff edge with two hundred kilometres of river in front of it
- The hotel that put Canada on postcards, built by a railway company to fill its own trains
- A staircase steep enough that they used to drive cattle down it, and named accordingly
- The square where Champlain landed, still the shape he left it
- A star fort on the highest point of the cliff, garrisoned by a regiment that parades in bearskins
Where to stay
Quebec City, two nights
The old town is two levels. Haute-Ville sits on top of the cliff behind the walls, with the cathedral, the citadel, the government buildings and most of the hotels. Basse-Ville is the strip of seventeenth century houses squeezed between the cliff and the river, which is where the town actually started.
Stay inside the walls if the budget allows, because the old town at seven in the morning and ten at night is a different and much better place than the old town at two in the afternoon. Failing that, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste district just outside the Porte Saint-Jean is cheaper, five minutes away and where people actually live.
Day by day
Day 1 in Quebec City
The terrace, the Frontenac and the cathedral
Come up to the cliff edge first and get your bearings from the top, because everything else in Quebec makes sense once you have seen the river.
Dufferin Terrace is a wooden boardwalk running along the top of the escarpment, built over the foundations of the French governors' chateau, and it is the single best thing in the city that costs nothing. The St Lawrence is a couple of kilometres wide below you and the ferry crosses to Levis every twenty minutes or so. Behind it stands the Chateau Frontenac, a railway hotel from 1893 with a copper roof and turrets, put up by Canadian Pacific to give people a reason to take its trains. It worked so well that the building is now the shorthand for the entire country.
Then a few minutes inland to the basilica-cathedral, the seat of the Catholic archdiocese and the oldest parish church north of Mexico, founded in 1647 and rebuilt twice after fire and bombardment. The interior is gilded and theatrical and the crypt holds four governors of New France.
Dinner in the old town on the first night is worth doing properly rather than cheaply. Quebecois cooking is game, root vegetables, maple and pastry, and the tourist end of it is much better than that description suggests.
- 15:00
Dufferin Terrace
OtherFree, always open, and best at dusk when the lights come on across the river in Levis. The Champlain statue marks the north end.
- 16:15
Chateau Frontenac
ArchitectureWalk through the lobby even if you are not staying. The bar upstairs does a martini with a view and charges accordingly.
- 17:15
Basilique-cathédrale Notre-Dame de Québec
ReligiousTwo unmatched towers, a gilded interior and a crypt with the governors of New France in it. Free to enter, small charge for the crypt tour.
- 19:00
Aux Anciens Canadiens
ArchitectureCaribou, bison and pea soup in a house from 1675, in the most tourist-facing spot in the city and still worth the table. Book, and take the early prix fixe.
With more time: If you arrive with the afternoon free, walk the top of the wall from Porte Saint-Louis round to the Parc d'Artillerie, which takes about half an hour and puts the shape of the defences in your head.
Day 2 in Quebec City
Down the Breakneck Stairs to where the city started
Everything today is below the cliff, and the way down is the point. The Escalier Casse-Cou has been on this line since the 1630s and its name, the Breakneck Stairs, is not a marketing decision: cattle were driven down here to the lower town market and the gradient shows it.
At the bottom is Rue du Petit Champlain, a narrow lane of seventeenth and eighteenth century houses that is now the oldest shopping street in North America and knows it. Come at nine and you have it to yourself. Come at two and you are in a queue.
A hundred metres on is Place-Royale, the square built on the exact spot where Champlain put his habitation in 1608. It is small, stone, and closed on all sides, and the trompe-l'oeil mural on the wall at the top of it is worth five minutes of working out who is who. The church on the square, Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, went up in 1688 on the foundations of Champlain's own building and is the oldest stone church in North America. It is named for two failed sieges, one English and one from New England, which tells you something about how the seventeenth century went here.
Lunch in Lower Town, then let the afternoon go. If you want one more thing indoors, the civilisation museum is on the waterfront two minutes away and is the best modern museum in the province.
- 09:15
Escalier Casse-Cou
OtherSteep, uneven and shorter than it looks. Take it downwards and buy the funicular ticket for the way back.
- 09:45
Quartier Petit Champlain
OtherThe lane of old houses under the cliff. Before ten it is a neighbourhood; by midday it is a shopping street with a queue in it.
- 11:15
Place-Royale
ArchitectureThe founding site of the city, a closed stone square about forty metres across. The painted wall at the top rewards a proper look.
- 12:00
Église Notre-Dame-des-Victoires
ReligiousSmall, dark and 1688, with a model ship hanging from the ceiling as a votive offering. Ten minutes inside is enough and worth it.
- 12:45
Le Lapin Sauté
EatRabbit and duck in a Lower Town house with a courtyard, and one of the few places down here where the food matches the setting.
- 18:30
Bar Château Frontenac
EatBack up the funicular for a drink at the hotel bar as the light goes. Expensive, and the view is the thing you are buying.
With more time: The Musee de la civilisation is a two minute walk from Place-Royale and takes about two hours, or carry on north along the quays to the old port and the naval museum.
Day 3 in Quebec City
The citadel on the last morning
Finish at the top. The Citadelle occupies the highest point of Cap Diamant in a four-pointed star, built by the British between 1820 and 1850 against an American attack that never came, on top of French works that had been there for a century already. It is still a working army base, home of the Royal 22e Regiment, whose members serve in French and whose ceremonial guard wear scarlet tunics and bearskins.
In summer the changing of the guard happens at ten in the morning and is the reason to be there early. Out of season you go round with a guide, which is better history and much less spectacle. Either way you get the view back along the wall and down the river that explains the whole town.
From the citadel gate it is twenty minutes downhill to Gare du Palais and about the same by taxi to the airport.
- 09:30
The Citadel
VisitGuided tours only, roughly an hour. Aim for the ten o'clock guard change from late June to early September, and check the day's schedule before you walk up.
With more time: With a later flight, the Battlefields Park behind the citadel is where the 1759 battle was fought and is now a hundred hectares of grass and cliff-top path, with the provincial fine arts museum at the far end of it.
Before you go
Getting in
Jean Lesage airport is fifteen kilometres west of the old town, twenty-five minutes by taxi, and served mostly by domestic flights plus seasonal charters. If you are coming from outside North America you will almost certainly connect through Montreal or Toronto.
The better arrival is the train. VIA Rail runs several times a day from Montreal in about three and a quarter hours and stops at Gare du Palais, a turreted pile in Lower Town that looks like a small version of the hotel on the cliff above it, because the same architect designed both. From there the old town is a ten minute walk uphill.
Getting around
On foot, entirely. The whole of this trip is inside or immediately beside the walls and nothing below is more than twenty minutes from anything else.
The one piece of infrastructure worth paying for is the funicular between Lower Town and the terrace, which costs about five dollars and saves you the Breakneck Stairs when your legs have had enough. Going down the stairs and coming back up the funicular is the sensible order.
Wear something with grip. The old town is cobbled, steep in both directions, and slick in the rain.
Language
Quebec City is far more French than Montreal. English is understood everywhere a visitor goes and used less readily, and outside the old town you should not assume it at all.
Bonjour on the way in, merci on the way out, and a visible attempt at the rest gets you a long way. Nobody expects fluency.
When to come
June to October is the straightforward season, with September the pick of it: warm days, cold enough nights for the trees to turn, and the summer crowds gone. July brings the Festival d'ete, which fills the fields behind the walls with music for eleven days and fills every hotel room with it.
The other good answer is February, for the Carnaval and for the sight of a walled city under a metre of snow. It is genuinely severe cold, well below freezing for weeks, and the city is set up for it in a way that visitors from milder places are not.
Quebec is one of the rare places where the postcard and the town are the same thing, and the trick to enjoying it is timing rather than effort. The cruise passengers arrive mid-morning and are gone by six, so the two hours at either end of the day are quiet, cheap and yours.
Two nights is the minimum that gets you both of those windows. It is the reason to sleep inside the walls rather than come up from Montreal for the day.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Quebec City better than Montreal?
- It is prettier and much smaller; Montreal is a proper city and eats better. They are two hundred and fifty kilometres apart on the same train line and the sensible answer is both.
- Are three days too many?
- No, though two would do the sights. The third day buys you the old town outside coach hours, which is when it stops being a film set and starts being a town.
- Do I need a car?
- Not for anything above. Hire one only if you are adding Montmorency Falls, the Ile d'Orleans or Charlevoix, and then only for those days.
- Is it worth coming in winter?
- Yes, if you understand what you are agreeing to. Minus twenty is a normal February morning. The compensation is a walled city under snow and a carnival built around enduring it.
- Where do I actually eat?
- Away from Rue Saint-Louis. Walk ten minutes out through the Porte Saint-Jean into the Saint-Jean-Baptiste district and the prices halve while the cooking improves.