page_title: Quebec City
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Quebec City / Geography
caption_attribution_description: Québec City – Boulevard Champlain - Le Fleuve Saint-Lorent
context_page_description: Quebec City, officially Québec, is the capital city of the Canadian province of Quebec. As of July 2016 the city had a population of 531,902, and the metropolitan area had a population of 800,296. It is the eleventh largest city and the seventh largest metropolitan area in Canada.
  The Algonquian people had originally named the area Kébec, an Algonquin word meaning "where the river narrows", because the Saint Lawrence River narrows proximate to the promontory of Quebec and its Cape Diamant. Explorer Samuel de Champlain founded a French settlement here in 1608, and adopted the Algonquin name. Quebec City is one of the oldest European cities in North America. The ramparts surrounding Old Quebec are the only fortified city walls remaining in the Americas north of Mexico. This area was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985 as the "Historic District of Old Québec".
  The city's landmarks include the Château Frontenac hotel that dominates the skyline and the Citadelle of Quebec, an intact fortress that forms the centrepiece of the ramparts surrounding the old city and includes a secondary royal residence.
context_section_description: Quebec City was built on the north bank of the Saint Lawrence River, where it narrows and meets the mouth of the Saint-Charles River. Old Quebec is located on top and at the foot of Cap-Diamant, which is on the eastern edge of a plateau called the promontory of Quebec (Quebec hill). Because of this topographic feature, the oldest and most urbanized borough of La Cité-Limoilou can be divided into upper and lower town. North of the hill, the Saint Lawrence Lowlands is flat and has rich, arable soil. Past this valley, the Laurentian Mountains lies to the north of the city but its foothills are within the municipal limits.
  The Plains of Abraham are located on the southeastern extremity of the plateau, where high stone walls were integrated during colonial days. On the northern foot of the promontory, the lower town neighbourhoods of Saint-Roch and Saint-Sauveur (fr), traditionally working class, are separated from uptown's Saint-Jean-Baptiste and Saint-Sacrement (fr) by a woody area attested as Coteau Sainte-Geneviève.
  The area was affected by the 1925 Charlevoix–Kamouraska earthquake.
  The administrative region in which it is situated is officially referred to as Capitale-Nationale, and the term "national capital" is used to refer to Quebec City itself at the provincial level.
caption: The Promontory of Quebec at the narrowing of the Saint Lawrence River and surrounded by the Laurentian Mountains
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