Trois-Rivières

French explorers used the name Trois-Rivières from the end of the 16th century for the place where the Saint-Maurice, split by two islands into three channels, meets the St Lawrence; the Algonquin and Abenaki had long used it as a summer stopping place. In 1634 Samuel de Champlain sent the Sieur de Laviolette to build a fort there, making it the second permanent settlement in New France after Quebec City. Fur traders, Jesuits, and later the Ursulines, who arrived in 1697 to run a hospital and school, gave the small town its early institutions, and it played an important role in the fur trade.

Iron came next. From the 1730s the Forges du Saint-Maurice, a few kilometres upriver, made pots, pans and stoves, the first successful ironworks in New France, and they ran under French and then British rule until 1883. The town itself stayed small, a cathedral and market town for the farms of the north shore, until the 19th century brought timber: logs floated down the Saint-Maurice to sawmills at its mouth, and in the 1900s the mills turned to pulp and paper. From the late 1920s until the early 1960s Trois-Rivières was known as the pulp and paper capital of the world, with five mills at its peak.

A fire in 1908 destroyed most of the old centre, sparing the Ursuline monastery, the De Tonnancour manor and the small quarter around rue des Ursulines, and the city was rebuilt with wider streets. The 20th century added the Laviolette Bridge in 1967 and a university in 1969, but falling demand for newsprint closed two of the five paper mills, and unemployment reached 14 per cent in the 1990s. In 2002 the city absorbed Cap-de-la-Madeleine and four other municipalities. Today it has rebuilt the riverfront, turned a paper mill's filtration plant into a museum and leans on its university, port, technology parks and festivals.

Trois-Rivières is a thoroughly French-speaking city of the Quebec heartland, Catholic in its monuments if not in its habits, and prouder of its age than most Canadian cities: the 1634 founding is on the signs, the Ursulines left their name on a street, and the old quarter is small enough to walk in half an hour. The shrine of Notre-Dame-du-Cap, across the Saint-Maurice, is Canada's national shrine to the Virgin Mary and draws thousands of pilgrims each year.

The city calls itself the capital of poetry, thanks to a festival that has filled the centre with readings every autumn since 1985 and to plaques of verse posted around the centre. Summer belongs to FestiVoix, a music festival of nine or ten days that takes over the riverfront and the old quarter, and to concerts at the open-sided amphitheatre on the river, which has also staged summer productions by Cirque du Soleil. Dance and heavy metal have their own festivals, and the university gives the city a student population that keeps rue des Forges busy.

Sport means the Grand Prix, which has run through the exhibition grounds each August since 1967 and is the longest-running street race in North America, and hockey, from minor leagues to the professional Trois-Rivières Lions, a Montreal Canadiens farm team. Manners are warm and informal, the bonjour is universal, and conversation turns easily to the Canadiens, the weather and the price of housing.

About 140,000 people live in the city and about 160,000 in its metropolitan area, which reaches across the river to Bécancour. The population grew by 3.5 per cent between 2016 and 2021 and is older than the Canadian average, with a median age of 47, and students at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières bring younger faces. French is the sole mother tongue of about 94 per cent of residents.

The economy has moved on from newsprint. The university, health care, government offices and the port are major employers, alongside the three remaining paper mills, metal transformation, electronics and cabinet making, an aeronautical industrial park by the airport, the industrial park at Bécancour across the bridge and newer technology parks.

People live in the brick streets of the centre, in Cap-de-la-Madeleine's parishes, and in the bungalow suburbs of Trois-Rivières-Ouest and the plateau, which is where the shopping centres are. Weekdays mean short commutes by car and a lunch of a sandwich or a poutine; summer evenings mean the terraces of rue des Forges and the riverfront promenade; winters mean snow clearing, indoor arenas and weekends skiing or snowmobiling in the Mauricie. Housing costs, the state of the hospital and the health of the river are the staples of local politics.

Trois-Rivières eats the food of rural Quebec. Tourtière, the spiced meat pie, pâté chinois, the layered beef, corn and potato dish, fèves au lard, baked beans with salt pork, and sugar pie are on family tables and on the menus of the casse-croûtes, the snack bars that serve poutine, hot dogs steamés and fried clams in summer. Maple is part of the regional calendar, and the sugar shacks in the surrounding countryside fill with families from March, when the sap runs, for meals drowned in syrup followed by tire d'érable, taffy rolled on snow.

Beer is a local point of pride. The city has several microbreweries, and the brewpubs pour their own ales and lagers within a few blocks of rue des Forges, with the terraces along that street the place to drink them on a summer night. Local cheeses, strawberries and sweetcorn in season fill the stalls of the summer markets.

Eating out ranges from the bistros and cafés of the old quarter, some of them letting diners bring their own wine, to the bars and pizzerias of rue des Forges and the restaurants of the hotels near the riverfront. Cap-de-la-Madeleine keeps the snack bars, and the shopping strips of Trois-Rivières-Ouest have the chains.