Parc de l'Artillerie

The Parc de l'Artillerie features a massive, fortress-like stone complex surrounded by heavy defensive walls. For over two centuries, this site housed the French and later British garrisons that controlled the St. Lawrence River. In seventeen eighty-three, the British military needed to store vast quantities of gunpowder safely, so they constructed the Dauphine Redoubt with walls over five feet thick. It served as a bomb-proof vault, eventually becoming a place where soldiers lived, worked, and waited for battles that rarely came.