Discover Quebec

Quebec covers over 1.5 million square kilometres — three times the size of France — but almost everyone lives on a thin strip along the St Lawrence. North of that strip the Canadian Shield takes over: ancient rock, boreal forest and, past the treeline, the tundra of Nunavik. The river itself widens into something closer to a sea before it reaches the Gulf.

Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608, and New France grew along the St Lawrence for a century and a half before Britain took it in 1759. What followed was survival rather than assimilation: a French-speaking Catholic society kept its language and law under British rule, joined Canada in 1867, and then in the 1960s remade itself completely in the space of a decade.

A culture that had to be deliberate about existing tends to produce a lot of it. Quebec supports its own star system, its own television, its own pop charts and a theatre and circus tradition that the rest of the world imports — all in a language spoken by a small minority of the continent.

Four real seasons, taken to extremes. Winters run to weeks below −20°C with metres of snow; summers are hot and humid enough for air conditioning; and between them sit a short, muddy spring and an autumn that turns the hardwood forests the colour the province puts on its tourism posters.

Quebec cooks like a cold place that had to store food for seven months — pork, root vegetables, pastry and syrup — and like a city that took in waves of immigrants who changed what the cold place ate.