Governors’ Promenade

The wooden decking and stairs of Governors’ Promenade were not part of the fortress. This is a twentieth-century pedestrian path: it runs along the slope of Cape Diamond from Dufferin Terrace to the Plains of Abraham. Yet its route was drawn on the city plan almost a century earlier.

In eighteen sixty-nine, the city architect Charles Baillairgé proposed expanding Durham Terrace—the name then used for what is now Dufferin Terrace. Baillairgé was working to modernize the cramped city: he needed broad thoroughfares and public spaces beside the old fortifications. Three years later, Lord Dufferin, Governor General of Canada, arrived in Québec City. In summer, he lived in the official residence inside the Citadel of Québec and advocated preserving the fortress walls.

Lord Dufferin supported Baillairgé’s proposal and incorporated it into a much larger project. In November eighteen seventy-five, he presented the city committee with a plan for a promenade belt around the fortifications. From the terrace, the path was to run alongside the Citadel of Québec and emerge at the Plains of Abraham. Committee members hoped to attract visitors and restore to Québec City some of the income and prestige lost after the Canadian capital was moved and the British garrison departed.

Lord Dufferin did not manage to carry out the whole plan. Before leaving Canada in eighteen seventy-eight, he laid the first stone of the expanded terrace. It opened the following summer, after he had left. The path along the slope remained on paper.

The project was revived in preparation for Québec City’s three hundred fiftieth anniversary. The federal government began construction in nineteen fifty-eight. Because of the condition of the Citadel of Québec’s walls, the use of explosives near the cliff was prohibited. A substantial part of the decking was carried out over the slope on reinforced-concrete supports; some columns had to be sunk about twelve meters into the rock. On September ninth, nineteen sixty, Canada’s prime minister John Diefenbaker opened the completed promenade.

The plural in the name was chosen deliberately. Here, governors means the appointed representatives of the French, then British monarch, and later the governors general of Canada. Their residences successively occupied this end of the cape. Beneath Dufferin Terrace, the remains of Fort Saint-Louis and Château Saint-Louis survive, where French and British governors lived. Above the present promenade, behind the walls of the Citadel of Québec, stands the residence of the governor general, first occupied by Lord Dufferin in eighteen seventy-two. Six hundred fifty-five meters of decking and three hundred eight steps connect the site of the former governor’s residence with the fortress where such a residence exists today.