Quebec City Landmarks

Historic Quebec City Described by Famous 19th Century Visitors ...

It all began just a bit more than four centuries ago when, legend tells us, Jacques Cartier’s pilot exclaimed in Norman-French Que bec ! ("What a peak!") when he saw what is now Cap Diamant (Cape Diamond).

"The impression made upon the visitor by this Gibraltar of America, its giddy heights, its citadel suspended, as it were, in the air; its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways; and the splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn, is at once unique and lasting,” writer Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit.

Dickens also was impressed by the city’s institutions and charities, its history and the beauty of the surrounding countryside, but in his notes returns often to details of the picturesque view from the citadel, impressed by such things as “the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze, whose distant rigging looks like spiders' webs against the light."

Poet and naturalist Henry David Thoreau noted that European visitors had long compared Quebec City to such memorable views as those from Edinburgh Castle or of Gibraltar. That was decades before the United Nations designated Quebec as a World Heritage site.

“It is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a solitary and majestic river cape alone that this view is obtained,” Thoreau wrote of his 1850 visit. He continues: “I still remember the harbour far beneath me, sparkling like silver in the sun, the answering headlands of Point Levis on the south-east, the frowning Cap Tourmente abruptly bounding the seaward view in the north-east…You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of civilization. Yonder small group of hills [form] the portals of the wilds which are trodden only by the feet of the Indian hunters as far as Hudson's Bay.