"ESCALIER CASSE-COU - Visiting Quebec's lower town is a must. So, if you are at the Chateau Frontenac, you may take the steep and winding street called Côte de la Montagne and the Escalier Casse-Cou (Breakneck Stairs)"
"FUNICALAR - If you are at the Dufferin Terrace, you may use the funicular, whose exit is seen at the right hand-side of the first picture and on the top of the second"
"STREETS - Lower Town was the starting point from which Quebec grew, and is the place where one can get an exciting sense of how New France would have looked like in its earliest days"
"MAISON CHEVALIER and Chateau Frontenac - The tall chimneys and red tiled roofs indicate that one is in front of the stone house, with a typical New France style, built in 1752 for Jean-Baptiste Chevalier, a wealthy merchant"
"PLACE ROYALE was the epicentre of life in Quebec for many years and is the focal point of Lower Town. Laid out in 1688 on the site of the garden of Champlain’s Habitation of 1608, it was used as a market square and public forum. A reconstruction made in the late 1960s was intended to return it to the appearance it had at the time of the conquest"
"NOTRE-DAME-DES-VICTOIRES - Place Royale is dominated by the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. An inaccurate popular belief holds that the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires is the oldest in Québec. Anyhow, it is built partly on the foundations on part of Champlain's residence in 1624 and was dedicated in 1690 as Église Notre-Dame-des-Victoires when thirty four British ships withdrew after a five-day siege of the city. So it's old enough to feed the belief. «Victory» turned «victories in 1711 when a British naval attack was disrupted by a violent storm. However, the British came a third time, in 1759, and the church was almost completely destroyed by their bombardment. Like the Portuguese saying: «Não há duas sem três» and «À terceira, é de vez!..."
No comments:
Post a Comment