Quebec

Iroquoian villagers farmed the St Lawrence valley when Jacques Cartier planted a cross at Gaspé in 1534 and visited Stadacona and Hochelaga, on the sites of Quebec City and Montreal, the following year; by the time the French returned, those villages had vanished. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608 and Ville-Marie, later Montreal, was founded in 1642. New France grew slowly on the fur trade, alliances with the Wendat, Innu and Algonquin, wars with the Haudenosaunee, and a seigneurial farm system whose long, narrow lots still mark the riverbanks.

British forces took Quebec City after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and France ceded the colony in 1763. The Quebec Act of 1774 kept French civil law and the Catholic Church's position. The colony became Lower Canada in 1791, saw the Patriote rebellions of 1837–38, and entered Confederation as the province of Quebec in 1867, a largely rural, Church-led society while English-speaking businessmen dominated Montreal's economy.

The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s secularised education and health, built Hydro-Québec into a state power company and fostered a new Québécois identity. Montreal hosted Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics, while the FLQ's kidnappings led to the October Crisis of 1970. The Parti Québécois took power in 1976 and passed the Charter of the French Language in 1977. Referendums on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995 were both defeated, the second by a margin of about one percentage point, and the question of Quebec's place in Canada remains a live political theme.

French is the official language of Quebec and the first language of about four in five residents. The Charter of the French Language, known as Bill 101, and later laws such as Bill 96 regulate signs, schooling and business language; supporters see them as protecting a minority language on an English-speaking continent, while critics, including many English-speaking Quebecers, see them as restrictive. Montreal remains strongly bilingual, with a large anglophone community and many immigrants who speak both languages and more. Everyday Québécois French has its own vocabulary and accent, and informal joual became a literary language in the 1960s.

The Catholic Church once ran schools and hospitals, and its churches and roadside crosses still fill the landscape, but Quebec is now one of Canada's most secular provinces. Eleven Indigenous nations, among them the Cree, Innu, Mohawk, Atikamekw, Wendat and the Inuit of Nunavik, live within the province.

The calendar runs from Quebec City's winter Carnaval to spring visits to the cabane à sucre, the Fête nationale on 24 June and Montreal's summer festivals, including the International Jazz Festival and Just for Laughs. Cirque du Soleil was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul, the Montreal Canadiens are followed almost religiously, and the motto on every licence plate reads "Je me souviens".

More than eight million people live in Quebec, roughly half of them in greater Montreal, a metropolitan area of about 4.3 million. Quebec City, the capital, has about 550,000 people; Laval, Gatineau across the river from Ottawa, Longueuil, Sherbrooke, Saguenay and Trois-Rivières are the other large centres. The vast north is thinly populated, much of it by Cree and Inuit communities.

The economy rests on hydroelectricity from the great northern dams, aluminium smelting, mining, forestry and paper, and in Montreal on aerospace, video games, artificial intelligence research, finance and universities such as McGill and the Université de Montréal. Quebec produces most of the world's maple syrup.

Life follows the seasons: long winters of snow clearing, skating rinks and ski weekends, then summers spent at the chalet, on terraces and at festivals. On 1 July many Montreal leases end at once, making it the city's moving day. Quebec has public daycare at low fees, and its politics revolve around language, immigration levels, secularism, housing costs and the future of the health system.

Quebec's cooking grew from rural French roots and long winters. Tourtière is a spiced meat pie eaten at Christmas, pâté chinois a layered dish of beef, corn and mashed potato, fèves au lard are beans baked with salt pork and maple, and cretons is a pork spread for breakfast toast. Poutine — chips topped with squeaky cheese curds and gravy — spread from rural snack bars in the 1950s to the whole country.

Montreal adds its own classics: smoked meat, brisket cured and smoked and piled into rye-bread sandwiches, and Montreal bagels, smaller, denser and sweeter than New York's, boiled in honeyed water and baked in wood-fired ovens.

Maple is everywhere. At a sugar shack in spring, families eat ham, beans, omelettes and oreilles de crisse (crisp fried pork rinds) drowned in syrup, then pour boiling syrup onto snow for tire d'érable, maple taffy. Desserts include tarte au sucre, sugar pie, and pouding chômeur, a pudding baked in maple syrup. Quebec makes many cheeses, from Oka to small farm cheeses, and invented cidre de glace, ice cider made from frozen apples. The Eastern Townships grow wine, and microbreweries such as Unibroue are widely known.

Montreal's old quarter holds the Notre-Dame Basilica, Place Jacques-Cartier and the Old Port, while Mount Royal park rises behind downtown. The Plateau's staircase-fronted houses, the Jean-Talon Market and the Olympic Park with the Biodome and Botanical Garden fill out a visit. Quebec City's walled old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has the Château Frontenac on Dufferin Terrace, the star-shaped Citadelle, the Plains of Abraham and Petit-Champlain below the cliff; just outside are Montmorency Falls, higher than Niagara, the farms of Île d'Orléans and the shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré.

North of Montreal, the Laurentians are lakes and forested hills, with Mont-Tremblant the best-known resort and Mont-Tremblant National Park for canoeing and hiking. South-east, the Eastern Townships mix villages such as North Hatley and Sutton, Lake Memphrémagog, Mont Orford and the monastery of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac.

East of Quebec City, Charlevoix's hills fall to the river around Baie-Saint-Paul and La Malbaie, with the Hautes-Gorges-de-la-Rivière-Malbaie park inland. At Tadoussac, where the Saguenay fjord joins the St Lawrence, whale-watching boats head into the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park in search of belugas, minke and fin whales. The Gaspé peninsula ends in Forillon National Park, the town of Gaspé and Percé Rock, with the northern gannets of Bonaventure Island opposite; the Magdalen Islands lie out in the Gulf.