Things to Do in Québec City with Kids and Teens

travel dates: July, 2024

“Our city looks old because we built it to look old,” revealed our tour guide as we wandered the ridiculously picturesque streets of Old Québec with him. Which doesn’t mean that the buildings aren’t actually old–they are, with many dating to the 19th century and others as far back as the 17th–but that the old city center didn’t pass through time unscathed, looking like a postcard drawing of a quaint European town, for its entire history. He showed us some photos of the area from a few decades ago, looking decidedly rougher and more…lived in, which made it clear that it owes its current state to a lot of hard work and dedication and deliberate decisions that came together to make something lovely that feels absolutely enchanted.

And kind of Epcot-esque.

I’ve made that comparison a lot, and I’m afraid it sounds negative, but I don’t mean it that way at all. I love Epcot. Here’s Epcot Canada:

Keeping Québec City looking old required at least two distinct decisions, and its status as a Unesco World Heritage Site (and a hotbed of tourism) depends on those two decisions going the way they did. The walls around the old city date back to the 17th century, making Québec City the oldest still fortified city in North America north of Mexico. By the late 19th century, though, the walls were no longer useful or needed for defense and they were in danger of being dismantled. But Lord Dufferin, the Governor General of Canada, said “not so fast! These walls are cool!” or something like that and the fortifications got to stay.

Ari looking cool in front of the cool walls:

 

The gates that you see today look nothing like the original city gates. They were rebuilt to look cooler for tourists. Apparently I wasn’t impressed, because I can only find this one picture with the gate in the background, not even getting to be the star of my photograph after all that work people did to make it look pretty:

How best to deal with the stuff inside the gates was a matter of much debate during the mid 20th century, but ultimately the city created a “declared historic district” in 1963 that led to a lot of rules and renovation and a central district that looks how it looks today, which is to say very old and historical in a very specific, quaint and lovely, tourist-friendly way.

We spent 4 nights/3 full days here in early July, and we packed a lot in! For this part of our trip, our oldest son, Ari, flew up to join us (he had been at home working for most of the summer), and Dave’s parents drove up from New Hampshire, so we had a big crew (all of our kids except Milo, who was at a music program in Colorado) spanning a lot of different age groups.  Here’s what we did.

Walking Tour

(incidentally, I should probably say something about those pink guys who keep showing up in my pictures. That was a public art installation specific to summer of 2024, I believe. They’re not there all the time!)

We didn’t actually do our walking tour until our third and last day, but I’m putting it first because that’s probably actually the better time to do one. There are a few different, well-reviewed tour companies, but we went with “The Grand Tour” with Tours Voir Québec. Honestly, went with this one mostly because the Cicerone tours, with costumed guides, were sold out for our day. I love a good costumed guide.

But! Our tour guide and thus our tour was great! It was a two hour walk around the old city, starting near the Château Frontenac and ending up down the hill near the Funicular (so that you can take it back up if you don’t want to tackle the hill or the stairs. Or usually you can, but it was mysteriously shut down when we finished, much to the disappointment of my in-laws). I believe all the tours follow the same route, but different guides put their own spins on things. Ours was interested in architecture, which suited me just fine.

Waiting on our tour to start:

Fun fact that stuck with me: Quebec City was founded by Samuel de Champlain, so of course the city wanted to put up a nice statue of him. And they did, in the late 19th century…only it’s not really of  Champlain, because no one ever bothered to paint the poor guy, so no one knows what he looks like. The Champlain statue is just…a guy (specifically it’s Michel d’Emery, Louis XIII’s superintendant of finance, because…why not I guess?)

Anyway, the tour is a great way to get oriented and learn some cool stuff about the history and culture of the city. Our tour guide told us this was a great place for a photo, so I dutifully took one:

Morrin Centre

It isn’t often that one can tour a jail, college, and library all in the same building. The Morrin Centre has a patchwork history as all of those things, which sounded fascinating, so we signed up for a tour. The first part took us through the 19th century jail, complete with the chance to be locked (briefly) in a cell. I took this picture because of how they’re all standing the same way with the same expression:

Next up our tour guide told us about the English-language college that the building used to house:

…and then showed us the still operating English language library to end the tour:

Museum of Civilization

It has just now, at this moment, hit me that Museum of Civilization is also the fictional museum in Station Eleven! Canadians love their museums of civilization! Anyway. Civilization is a pretty broad category, so this is a pretty great museum. There are permanent exhibits on the history of Quebec and on the Indigenous nations of the region.

I liked this part, which is a timeline of, like, all the best chairs?

And then there are temporary exhibits. When we were there there was one on wrestling, which we didn’t make it to, and then Rap Queb, about Quebec’s hip hop scene (this may shock you, but we knew absolutely nothing about Quebec’s hip hop scene prior to this visit). There was an audio tour here, and it’s where I took my favorite pictures:

Sadly, if you go, you won’t learn anything about wrestling or hip hop. But I’m sure you’ll learn something else that’s great. Right now it looks like they have stuff on the Titanic and the Anicinabe Nation.

Fortifications of Quebec National Historic Site

This historic site run by Parks Canada is all about the walls, as the name suggests. I don’t think we did this the way most people do. I gather that the most popular way to take in the site is by seeing the parts of it (and maybe taking a tour) in/around Dufferin Terrace…and under Dufferin Terrace, where you can see the remains of Chateau Saint-Louis. But I had read that Artillery Park offers a more kid-friendly experience, complete with an interactive adventure called the legend of the talking walls (!). This sounded awesome, so we picked that. Only I didn’t quite understand where it was (I maintain that the Parks Canada website is maddeningly difficult to navigate, at least for this site), so first we went to Dufferin Terrace and learned that we were in the wrong part of town entirely, and walked a long way to Artillery Park (I’ll talk more when I get to the campground review about how we got into the city and where we parked, but, basically, the old part of Quebec City is very walkable but also very hilly, and we walked up and down hills a lot).

Once we got to the actual site we meant to go to, we ended up spending most of the day there (with a break for lunch). There are several different buildings to tour in addition to the fun game. We started with the fun game, though, of course. You need to download the app to play it, and then you check in at the front desk and they give you a sword (or I think you can pick a necklace instead if you want, but who wouldn’t want a sword?!) and turn you loose to explore the walls nearby with a series of missions that your phone will tell you about. So kind of an outdoor scavenger hunt sort of situation.

It gave us some direction and purpose and helped us learn a little about the history, which is exactly what we wanted from the experience. Well, that and a chance to check out the dress up collection once we turned our sword back in:

There are exhibits about the history of the walled city in the same building where you get your sword, and then there are some other buildings to check out, including the Dauphine Redoubt, “one of the oldest military buildings in North America” which housed British, French, and American soldiers at various points in its long history. Different parts are set up to show different times in history, and it’s a very cool building to wander around in, with interpreters stationed in some places to explain what you’re seeing.

We found a room where you can try on hats!

Abe got a rather long lesson in rifles:

So we really enjoyed this stop, and, if you’re a big enough history nerd, it’s easy to spend the better part of a day here (we actually broke for lunch in the middle of all of this and came back).

Old Quebec Funicular

The Funicular isn’t actually a funicular at all anymore. There was a fatal accident in the mid 90’s, after which the whole thing was redone and is now just a regular old elevator going up the side of a steep hill (a funicular is two connected cars where one necessarily goes up as the other goes down). But it IS still a fun way to avoid walking up the very steep hill between Upper Town and Lower Town or taking the ominously nicknamed Breakneck Steps.

It’s also a pretty expensive way, particularly for a family, at $6/person (cash only) for a few seconds of excitement. So maybe worth doing once, but you might want to power up that hill on your own power after that if you’re able.

Walk around and look at how pretty everything is:

You should definitely set aside some time for this.

Montmorency Falls

Fun story about Montmorency Falls: if you go there (or at least if you went there as late as summer, 2025, according my sources) there’s a map of the park that touts an awesome-sounding “semi-submersible walkway” at the base of the falls. If you’re my family, you see this and immediately take off in search of this engineering marvel:

…only to get to the end of the path and see this sign in place of said engineering marvel:

So what happened was there was supposed to be a semi-submersible walkway, and they spent a lot of money on it back in 2021, and then when it came time to test it, it…didn’t work. Became a not so semi-submersible walkway, apparently. And then at some point they quietly gave up and stopped talking about it. Now, most people would wait until the walkway was actually built to add it to the permanent park maps, but the folks at Montmorency Falls were, it seems, far too optimistic for that. You’d think maybe some new maps would be in order, or at least some kind of addition to them making it clear that you can walk the whole trail if you want to, but you’re sure not going to see a semi-submersible walkway.

ANYWAY.

Honestly, even aside from the semi-submersible debacle, we weren’t super impressed with Montmorency Falls. They like to talk about how it’s 30 meters taller than Niagara Falls, and they seem to want to compete with Niagara Falls for overdevelopment as well.

The falls are about 15 minutes outside of Quebec City, and we headed out to see them one afternoon while Nana and Grandpa opted to stay behind. We first parked up at the top of the falls (if I remember correctly, you pay one admission fee that is good for both the top and bottom), opted to skip paying for any add-ons like this cable car:

…or terrifying zip-lining:

But did walk across the very crowded bridge at the top of the falls and checked out the also crowded viewing platform:

The falls are impressive enough, but there’s stuff in front of them any way you try to look at them, and…while they’re taller than Niagara Falls, they aren’t nearly as huge or awe-inspiring overall. Niagara Falls can handle being overrun with tourists and commercialism and still seem amazing. Poor Montmorency Falls just isn’t up to the task, IMHO.

Then we drove down to park at the bottom of the falls, where we had some ice cream in addition to the walk out to the danger sign:

And then we had to hurry back to the campground because the dogs were expecting dinner!

Where we Ate

I’m not going to call this section “places to eat” because we were very much surface scratchers here. But we were happy with everywhere we ended up. For example, we ate at Cochon Dingue, a local chain whose name means “Crazy Pig” in English. I can’t remember which location we ate at, except that I think it was near the lower funicular station.

This picture is actually, I’m pretty sure, from a different location that we walked past a day or two later. But it had a fun pig!

It’s French-inspired bistro cuisine, but we found enough to appeal to the picky eaters amongst us as well (which is to say they had burgers).

After our walking tour, we had a great lunch at Le Chic Shack, a spot right by the Chateau Frontenac that serves up craft burgers, milkshakes, and a creative assortment of “Poutine 2.0” dishes.

Probably our favorite meal was brunch at La Buche, which serves Quebecois cuisine in a really fun atmosphere. The washrooms are a whole experience by themselves.

And I think that was it for our stop in Quebec City, which was also our last stop in Canada! I’ll have a quick review of the Quebec City KOA up next (along with notes about getting into the city from there, complete with ferry workers strike).