Quebec City, Canada · North America

6 ideal things to do in Quebec City

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked December 22, 2025

1. 01

   Walk the ramparts

   Vieux-Québec, Upper Town·Any season; 4.6 km, and longer than that in a January wind

   The only fortified colonial town left standing north of Mexico, and you can walk the whole 4.6-kilometre circuit along the top of the walls, which Parks Canada has looked after since 1948. In deep winter the walk is fully exposed and the stone sends cold up through your boots, and the reward is the St Lawrence below with ice moving down it in slabs. Our walls in Split were built by an emperor and then had a city stuffed inside them. These were built to keep a city out.

2. 02

   The toboggan slide on Terrasse Dufferin

   Beside the Château Frontenac·Winter, once the run has been set

   A wooden sled, a 150-metre ramp that has been running down the boardwalk since about 1898, and no braking arrangement worth the name. Adults do this. Adults in office coats do it on a lunch break. I went down behind a woman of about seventy who screamed the entire length of the run, got off at the bottom, and immediately rejoined the queue, and I have thought about her a great deal since.

3. 03

   The Plains of Abraham under snow

   West of the Citadelle, on the bluff above the river·Winter, on skis or on foot

   Ninety-eight hectares of open plateau where Britain and France settled the fate of New France in about half an hour of musket fire in September 1759, both commanding generals dying of it. It is now a park where people ski across the battlefield on their lunch break. There is something very Canadian about the complete absence of drama in that, and it took me two visits to stop finding it strange.

4. 04

   Musée de la civilisation

   Rue Dalhousie, Lower Town·A cold afternoon

   Moshe Safdie fitted it into the old port fabric in 1988 and it has been the most intelligent museum in the city ever since. The permanent shows on Québécois identity and on the First Nations are argumentative rather than reverent, which is rarer in a national-story museum than it ought to be. Go when the weather has beaten you. Everyone else in the building arrived for the same reason and nobody mentions it.

5. 05

   Montmorency Falls in winter

   Just east of the city, on the way to Île d'Orléans·January or February, for the sugarloaf

   Eighty-three metres, a full thirty metres taller than Niagara, and in winter the spray freezes into a cone at the base that people here call the pain de sucre — the sugarloaf. There is a suspension bridge across the lip and a cable car for anyone who has already thought carefully about what a long open staircase feels like in that wind. I had not thought about it. Wear the boots you suspect are excessive.

6. 06

   Loop Île d'Orléans

   Over the bridge from Beauport, 5 km east of the city·Autumn for the orchards; about four hours by car

   Nearly 193 square kilometres of farming island in the St Lawrence, six village parishes around its edge, more than six hundred protected heritage buildings, and the whole thing designated a national historic site in 1990. Strawberries, apples, cider, maple. Drive it in one direction only and stop whenever a farm stand looks like it means it. The island is what the mainland looked like before the mainland got a shopping centre.