Dufferin Terrace and Château Frontenac
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Transcript
The Château Frontenac looks medieval, but it is not. Canadian Pacific opened the hotel in 1893 as part of a railway strategy: make distant landscapes desirable, then sell the journey needed to reach them.
The terrace beneath your feet carries an older layer. Governors of New France and later British administrators occupied this high ground because it dominates the river. Archaeological remains of Fort Saint-Louis and successive châteaux lie below and beside the promenade.
Lord Dufferin, governor general in the 1870s, became an important advocate for preserving Québec's walls and reshaping this cliff-top space.
The hotel is named for Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, a governor of New France. The building does not date from his era. It is nineteenth-century architecture wearing seventeenth-century historical clothing, and doing it remarkably well.