10 Best Sights in Quebec, Canada

Here's a wonderful opportunity to learn about the Loyalists who settled the area after fleeing the American Revolution. Several buildings, including the former county courthouse dating back to 1859, the old firehall (fire station), and a former school, house an eclectic collection that include 19th-century farm tools, Native Canadian arrowheads, and a military collection that includes uniforms and a World War I Fokker aircraft. The museum also maintains the Tibbits Hill Pioneer School, a stone schoolhouse built in 1834 to serve rural families—kids can find out what education was like in the mid-19th century.

Wedged between narrow streets at the foot of the cliff, this spacious museum, with its striking limestone-and-glass façade, was designed by architect Moshe Safdie to seamlessly blend into the landscape. Its bell tower thoughtfully echoes the shape of the city's church steeples. A new exhibition, running until 2030, powerfully witnesses the narratives of 95,000 First Nations and Inuit women and men of Québec as they reflect on history, embrace the present, and envision a hopeful future. The temporary exhibits here are always well worth a visit too.

Formerly known as the Canadian Museum of Civilization, this superb institution officially changed its name in 2013 when it received C$25 million in funding from the Canadian government in order to renovate and expand. More than 50,000 square feet of the existing museum has been renovated, and a Canadian History Hall showcasing the people and events that have shaped Canada over the last 15,000 years. Other highlights include the First Peoples Hall, which has some 2,000 objects on display, and the Children's Museum.

You can rattle around Canada's largest railroad museum in a vintage tram specially built for Montréal sightseeing tours in the 1950s, when the city still had a streetcar system. The museum has more than 120 train cars and locomotives, but if you're a steam buff, you won't want to miss CPR 5935, the largest steam locomotive built in Canada, and CNR 4100, the most powerful in the British Empire when it was built in 1924. To see how the rich and powerful traveled, take a look at Sir William Van Horne's luxurious private car. Of special interest to the kids will be the car that served as a mobile classroom. The museum is south of the city in the town of St-Constant. On weekdays Expo runs commuter trains from the Gare Lucien-l'Allier, next to the Centre Bell, to Candiac/St. Constant. Trains depart at 9:35 am and return at 1:27 pm.

Located in the waterfront park at the end of the Lachine Canal, on the shores of Lac St-Louis, this early 19th-century stone warehouse has been converted into a museum that commemorates the industry that dominated Canada's early history.

A few jagged stone walls are all that remain of Montréal's first general hospital. The ruins—which once formed the west wing and the transept of the chapel—have been preserved as a memorial to Canada's first native-born saint, Marguerite d'Youville (1701–71), who took over the hospital in 1747 and ran it until a fire destroyed the building in 1765. Ste-Marguerite's life was no walk in the park, as you'll find out if you visit the Maison de Mère d'Youville next door to the ruins. Marguerite started looking after the city's down-and-outers after the death of her abusive and disreputable husband. Amused that the widow of a whiskey trader should be helping the town drunks, locals took to calling Marguerite and her Soeurs de la Charité (Sisters of Charity) the Soeurs-Grises (Grey Nuns), slang for "tipsy nuns." The Maison has some remarkable reminders of her life, such as the kitchen where she worked, with its enormous fireplace and stone sink. Call ahead for tours of the house.  As of June 2025, the museum is still under renovation but the exterior is pretty.

David Ross McCord (1844–1930) was a wealthy pack rat with a passion for anything that had to do with Montréal or Canadian history. His collection of paintings, costumes, toys, tools, drawings, and housewares provides a glimpse of what city life was like for all classes in the 19th century. If you're interested in the lifestyles of the elite, however, you'll love the photographs that William Notman (1826–91) took of the rich at play. One series portrays members of the posh Montréal Athletic Association posing in snowshoes on the slopes of Mont-Royal, all decked out in Hudson Bay coats and woolen hats. Each of the hundreds of portraits was shot individually in a studio and then painstakingly mounted on a picture of the snowy mountain to give the impression of a winter outing. The McCord Stewart Museum's mission is to showcase life in Montréal, past and present. There are guided tours (call for schedule), a reading room, a documentation center, a gift shop, a bookstore, and a café. 

The museum traces the region's history through a major permanent exhibit. Folk art, paintings, and artifacts help reveal the past, starting with the French, then the Scottish settlers, and the area's evolution into a vacation spot and artists' haven. Temporary exhibits change every season.

The nuns of the Religieuses Hospitalières de St-Joseph ran Montréal's Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu for more than 300 years, until the province and the Université de Montréal took it over in the 1970s. The first sisters—girls of good families caught up in the religious fervor of the age—came to New France with Jeanne Mance in the mid-1600s to look after the poor, the sick, and the dying. The order's museum—tucked away in a corner of the hospital the nuns built but no longer run—captures the spirit of that age with a series of meticulously bilingual exhibits. Just reading the excerpts from the letters and diaries of those young women helps you to understand the zeal that drove them to abandon the comforts of home for the hardships of the colonies. The museum also traces the history of medicine and nursing in Montréal.   From May to October, tours of the "secret" monastery gardens are available for C$17. Most tours are in French, but some are offered in English on select dates. 

More than 40,000 objects represent fine arts, archaeology, ethnology, natural sciences, and photography, all highlighting the native Innu and European populations of the region. See prehistoric tools and arms, and photographs depicting the area’s iron ore mining operations. Taxidermy exhibits include birds, fish, and mammals, the black bear and Canadian lynx among them. Lots of local artists display their work here, too, in a collection made up of 85 prints, 375 sculptures, and 121 paintings from 98 Canadian artists.