Quebec

Quebec is Canada’s largest province by area and sits in the country’s east, stretching from the American border in the south all the way up to the shores of Hudson Bay and the Ungava Peninsula in the far north — a distance so vast that the landscape shifts dramatically from one end to the other. The south is where most of the province’s roughly nine million people live, clustered around the St Lawrence River valley in the cities of Montreal and Quebec City, and across the rolling farmland of the Eastern Townships. Further north, the land opens into the Laurentian Highlands, a plateau of boreal forest, lakes and rivers that covers the bulk of the province and is largely roadless beyond a handful of resource towns and logging tracks. Quebec is the only Canadian province where French is the sole official language, and that is not a token fact — it shapes daily life in ways that visitors feel immediately, from shop signs and menus written entirely in French to radio stations, advertising hoardings and local news that belong to a cultural world quite distinct from the rest of English-speaking Canada. For French speakers, arriving in Quebec feels like finding an unexpected pocket of France planted in North America; for those without French, it is still entirely navigable, particularly in Montreal and the more tourist-facing parts of Quebec City, where English is widely spoken, though making even a small effort with French is generally received warmly.

Montreal is the province’s largest city and the one most visitors encounter first, and it is a genuinely interesting place to spend time without being an especially tidy or easy city to characterise. It sits on an island in the St Lawrence River, with Mount Royal — the small but prominent hill that gives the city its name — rising at its centre and offering a straightforward walk up to a lookout that frames the downtown skyline and the river beyond. The city’s neighbourhoods vary considerably in character: the Plateau-Mont-Royal is dense with cafés, second-hand bookshops and lived-in terraced housing with the exterior staircases that are one of Montreal’s more distinctive architectural features; the Mile End has a reputation for creative industries and good bagel shops; the Old Port area around the original French settlement is tourist-facing but genuinely historic, with solid stone buildings and cobbled streets that give a reasonable sense of what the city looked like in the eighteenth century. Montreal has a well-earned reputation as a food city, shaped by its French heritage, a large Jewish community, and successive waves of immigration from Italy, Greece, Lebanon, China and many other places, all of which show up in the restaurants and markets scattered across the city’s different quarters. Winters in Montreal are serious — temperatures regularly fall to minus fifteen or below, and the city has developed an extensive underground pedestrian network linking metro stations, shopping centres and office buildings that allows a good portion of daily life to be conducted entirely indoors when conditions above ground become unpleasant.

Quebec City is a quite different proposition from Montreal — smaller, older in feel, and built on a dramatic site above the St Lawrence where the river narrows and the cliffs of the promontory known as Cap-Diamant rise sharply from the water. The Old City is divided into an upper town on the plateau above the cliffs and a lower town along the riverfront, connected by steep staircases and the funicular railway that tourists use far more than locals do. The upper town’s fortifications, gates and parade grounds are a genuine remnant of the city’s military past — Quebec City is the only remaining walled city north of Mexico, and its fortified old quarter is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for that reason. The Château Frontenac, the enormous castle-like hotel that sits above the cliffs and appears in virtually every photograph taken of the city, was built in the 1890s as a Canadian Pacific Railway hotel and is now one of the most photographed buildings in Canada, though it functions today in an entirely ordinary way as a rather grand place to stay or eat. Beyond the old walls, Quebec City is a working regional capital with government buildings, universities and suburbs extending along the river in either direction, and while tourism defines the experience of the walled historic core, the broader city gets on with daily life in a quieter and considerably less self-conscious way. The surrounding region offers straightforward access to the Laurentians, the Charlevoix coast along the St Lawrence, and the whale-watching grounds further downriver near Tadoussac, where the Saguenay River meets the St Lawrence and beluga and minke whales feed through the summer months.