In 2014 I took a solo road trip across northeastern North America in November, to visit friends in Boston, Vermont, and Montréal, go to a couple of concerts, and take photos in other places along the way. In between the New England visits and the Montréal visit was the farthest-out point of the trip, three days by myself in Québec City.
Though I'd previously been to Montréal several times and knew how to handle myself as an anglophone in French Canada, I had never been to the city of Québec before, and I knew no one there. That's one of my favorite ways to experience a city for the first time: just me, my camera, and no obligations. I got a reservation at a lovely little B&B in the heart of the Old City, parked the car for the duration, and set about exploring on foot.
There's a lot to explore within walking distance of the Old City, much more than enough to fill three days even in late November when most of the tourist-focused businesses are closed. (The only way that really mattered to me was an inability to get gelato.) Just east of the Old City is the eighteenth-century fort and the Plains of Abraham, the battlefield where Canada was lost to the British in 1759. The Fort of Québec was considered one of the most secure in North America because assaulting it from the river required scaling a high cliff. What was defensive 250 years ago is characteristic now, as a key feature of the city is stairs. So many stairs.
In the other direction, however, the Old City slopes down to the port in a cascade of fortifications, houses, and historic public buildings. That was the direction I went at night. Not far from my hotel was a particularly appealing building, the Séminaire de Québec.
According to their website this Catholic seminary was founded in 1663. It's a huge complex of buildings stretching downhill through the Old City, and fascinating to walk through on an empty November night. It may be historic, it may be solemn, but it's also very, very Canadian: in one of the courtyards I found a street hockey rink.
As you move out of the seminary and towards the river, there are fortifications that are filled with cannons. There are more cannons here than I've seen everywhere else in the world combined. Most older cities have kept a cannon or two for historic value; Québec seems to have kept all of theirs, as if they're still worried they'll have to fight off an invasion force using eighteenth-century methodology.
For all the cannons they have, it took me a while to get a photo of one that I really liked. I particularly enjoy the juxtaposition here of the historic cannon with the bright lights and smoke of the modern working port. Grain elevators may not be quite like fortifications but they have a little bit in common.
I hope this little taste of Québec has given you some of the desire to visit it that I took away from the experience. I've yet to have the opportunity to go back, though I have another trip to Montréal scheduled this fall and hopefully I can fit it in. As North American cities go, it's one of the easiest to explore purely as a pedestrian, as long as you can handle stairs. Fortunately there's a funicular available if you end up tired and at the bottom of the cliff.
This has been an entry in the 1001 Places to Remember project by 
