By the end of the summer, the City of Quebec must inaugurate the Grands-Domaines trail on the Sillery promontory, a seemingly modest development that nevertheless stems from a major political battle over accessibility to some of the most beautiful views of the river in the capital.
Word is starting to get around about the Grands-Domaines-de-Sillery trail. The site is not yet finished, but many walkers are already coming to explore it, time for a walk with the dog.
“It’s the second time I’ve come,” confided to the To have to Josée Desmeules, crossed Tuesday on the trail with her dog Winslow, a little wary terrier. A friend had told her about the place. “It piqued my curiosity. I found it superb. It’s beautiful because we have visual breakthroughs everywhere. »
The 1.3 kilometer trail starts from the Saint-Michel-de-Sillery church, at the top of the Church hill. It then runs along the cape, to the Cataraqui estate, from which a staircase will allow you to reach the bottom of the cliff in the Chemin du Foulon. The course is inhabited by old oaks and, on the north side, a sumptuous pine capable of diverting our gaze from the breathtaking views of the St. Lawrence. The City has fitted out a pretty gazebo, very designer wooden deckchairs and an insect-themed game module for junior walkers.
This pleasant path runs along a series of vast lands, the famous “grand estates” which, after having been occupied by the Aboriginals, were successively the property of the great British timber merchants (1830-1880), religious congregations (from the end of the XIXe century in the early 2000s) and more recently condominium complexes and the Maison Michel-Sarrazin, in particular.
The idea of laying out a path there has been in the air since the early 2000s, when aging religious communities began to desert their precious lands.
Lack of vision
Some, like former mayor Andrée Boucher, once saw it as a great opportunity for high-end real estate development. “” The rich are running away from us, she worried in an interview with the Quebec newspaper in the fall of 2006. “Québec has the lowest average income on the territory of the Communauté métropolitaine de Québec. […] I will organize myself so that the rich come to settle in Quebec. We need upscale neighborhoods. »
Combined, the religious communities then occupied an immense territory, from the Collège Jésus-Marie to the seminary of the Marist Fathers, passing through the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa and the Augustinians of the Mercy of Jesus.
Louis Vallée and others would have liked them to be bought by the public authorities so that they could be made into a large park which, they said, could have become an additional tourist attraction for the capital, like the plains of Abraham.
After all, argues the president of the Société d’histoire de Sillery today, the site is at the heart of the historic district of Sillery, one of the thirteen declared heritage sites in Quebec.
“There was a huge desire at the time to densify. But they were not obliged to densify in a historic sector! It was densification at all costs and that made the promoters very happy. »
Ten years ago, the debate raged on this subject in Quebec, heritage defenders urging the City and the Ministry of Culture to prevent the construction of condominiums on the grounds of Jesus-Marie in particular.
In 2011, the Heritage Foundation even included the historic district among the ten most endangered sites in Canada. However, the project was finally authorized in 2015.
“There was a lack of vision”, deplores Johanne Elsener who was also an activist at the time in the collective which opposed real estate projects. “There were also certainly pressures from private interests. »
A staircase in the “charcotte”
Three years later, the Government of Quebec agreed to invest $3 million in the trail project. It was in 2018. It will therefore have taken four years to see this project, to which the City contributed 1.5 million, come to fruition. In an interview, the project manager at the City, Dominic Aubé, explains that, had it not been for the pandemic, they could have delivered it at the scheduled time, at the end of last year. Mr. Aubé concedes, however, that the erection of the staircase in the cliff proved to be particularly difficult and more expensive than expected. “We had a few surprises,” he said.
The staircase, which connects the Cataraqui estate to the Chemin du Foulon, is located on the site of an old path that people took hundreds of years ago to reach the heights. They are called “charcottes”, a word created by our ancestors from English shortcut for “shortcut”.
Mr. Vallée would have liked the steps to be installed elsewhere and the original path preserved. “Before, you could imagine the timber baron who had his little kiosk on the edge of the cliff watching his timber yard from below, and the charcotte allowed his foreman to come and make his report. There, it is no longer possible. »
He hopes that the path will now be called upon to extend to the west to join the old house of the Jesuits, an emblematic site of the historic district.
At the City of Quebec, it is indicated that this is still part of the plans, without any deadline, however. The current trail is part of what is called “Phase 1” of the project. A possible phase 2 would make it possible to extend it beyond the Cataraqui domain towards the seminary of the Marist Fathers and the house of the Jesuits which is downstairs. In a second step, a third phase towards the east could link the starting point of the Saint-Michel church to the Bois-de-Coulonge park.
“All things considered, our major project, if it is financed until the end, would be the counterpart at the top of the cliff, in pedestrian mode, of the Samuel-De Champlain promenade,” summarizes Mr. Aubé.
The Grands-Domaines trail should be inaugurated in August. The City will open, in a second step, a functional track connecting it to Saint-Louis Road, but the deadlines are dependent on the work currently carried out by the owner of the land.
In the meantime, more and more walkers are coming to the site. It also seems that this path has always had its followers. “We are coming to regularize a situation with this beautiful project,” summarizes Mr. Aubé. “When we started the project, we saw that there were informal trails there,” he adds.
Despite these disappointments about the size of the project, Mr. Vallée for his part believes that such a project was unavoidable. “It’s something essential for the enhancement of the heritage site of Sillery,” he concludes.