THE EARLY-MORNING scenery that greeted me after an endless flight from tropical Manila was unquestionably northern. So was the crackling five-degree-Celsius air. Autumn, I was told, was just beginning to set in.

Along the deserted highway, my taxi passed copses of birch trees, their tiny leaves shimmering above slender trunks covered with white bark. Behind the birches, forests of maples in fierce autumn foliage eventually gave way to signs of civilization: island after island of asphalt parking lots around factories, new and used car lots, and outlet malls, a typical North American freeway landscape.

Despite the obviously North American setting, the radio spoke French. Bonjour, Québec.

Founded in 1608 and now celebrating its 400th anniversary, Québec stands out as one of North America’s oldest cities, unique for having maintained its French heritage.

Originally built as a fortification on a high bluff guarding the narrowest point of the Saint Lawrence River, Québec symbolized French presence in Canada. Today it’s the only surviving fortified city in the Americas north of Mexico.

The city fortifications, built section by section over a long period, would have been dismantled in the 19th century when widespread perception saw city walls as barriers preventing urban development and modernization. If not for the foresight of a French governor who went against public opinion by insisting on retaining the walls in the 19th century, Québec would have gone the way of Montréal and other cities that demolished their fortifications.

Québec’s identity of as a walled city led to the Unesco declaration of its Historic District (Vieux-Québec) as a World Heritage Site in 1985. Much of the city’s best heritage architecture is within the walls around Old Québec.

Its center is Place Royale at the edge of the bluff overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. Place Royale opens into Terasse Dufferin, a wooden esplanade following the edge of the cliff extending from Place Royale at one end, to the Plains of Abraham, a major park along the old city walls that marks the site of a decisive battle establishing British control over Québec in 1759.

Opening out to Terasse Dufferin is the fabled Château Frontenac, the symbol of the city.

In the tradition of French mediaeval hill towns clustered around a château, Old Québec, in no way medieval but still very much a hill town, clusters around its own château, Château Frontenac, the brash, bigger-than-life New World version of the medieval château, a 19th-century structure that eclipses anything ever seen in France.

A royal residence Château Frontenac is not. Named to honor Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, governor of New France from 1672-1682 and 1689-1698, the multi-turreted structure is a lavish hotel opened in 1893, one in a chain of grand hotels built across Canada for the Canadian Pacific Railway as a means of encouraging luxury-train travel.

Designed by architect Bruce Price, Château Frontenac is an outstanding example of the “châteauesque” style popular at the end of the 19th century, a romantic style that incongruously ornaments buildings with elaborate towers, spires, and exaggerated mansard roofs inspired by 16th-century Loire Valley châteaux. Despite their French ornamentation, buildings in the châteauesque style make no attempt to emulate original French châteaux. They are simply picturesque, romantic in a late 19th-century kind of way.

Also châteauesque are the main entrances into the Old City, Porte Saint-Louis and Porte Saint-Jean, the arched and turreted gates cut through the walls in the 19th century to widen the narrow old gates and decongest vehicles entering the Old City from the modern downtown section.

Near the Château Frontenac is Notre-Dame de Québec Cathedral, mother church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Québec, the first New World church raised to basilica status, the prime Catholic church of Canada.

In the Old Town is the Université Laval, the only French-language university in America. Founded in 1852, only the Faculty of Architecture remains in the historic university site, the other 17 faculties (or colleges) moved in 1946 to a sprawling, modern campus in a newer section of the city.

Not far from Université Laval is the Ursuline Convent built in 1642, the oldest institution of learning for women in North America. The first pupils of the French nuns were Iroqois Indians until in 1681, Bishop Laval instructed the nuns to devote themselves to the education of girls. The school remains in historic Ursuline buildings within the Old Town.

Old World is the feel within the walls. Shops, restaurants and inns in residentially scaled stone buildings, some old and others new, line winding narrow streets of the Upper Town. Government buildings, particularly the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall), are constructed in the familiar châteauesque style.

Connecting the Upper and Lower Towns is the steep escalier “casse-cou” (literally “neck-breaking” steps) or, for the less fit, the Old Québec Funicular makes the descent easier.

Québec Lower Town is today a gentrified tourist center where the ancient Notre Dame des Victoires Church, the historic Petit Champlain district, the ultramodern Museé de la Civilisation (Museum of Civilization), the quaint Vieux Port (Old Port) and tourist cruise ships docked along the Saint Lawrence all vie for visitors’ attention with boutiques and souvenir shops found one after the other all along the narrow, winding streets.

Period architecture, some original and others re-designed in the original style in the 1960s, recall the city’s beginnings and its origin as a port city where ships from France and other European countries called to trade with the Québécois. The old mixes with the new in Québec. Sometimes the distinction between the two blurs.

A city celebrating its 400th year has for its symbol a 19th-century romantic château-hotel built by a railroad company. As a compromise to prevent demolition of the 17th-century city fortifications, its narrow gates were widened in the style of 19th century, adding picturesque arches and turrets that could have come out of the Château de Blois in the Loire. The compromise, however, kept the fortifications from coming down.

Although Québec architecture references back to French origins, Québec has always, for the 400 years of its existence, been totally New World, having forged an identity totally its own, seen today in its lifestyle that comfortably fuses New with Old, a lifestyle that is as New World as the Québécois variant of French spoken today.

Québec today? At a supermarket all decked out for Halloween, I saw piles of gorgeous orange pumpkins waiting to be scooped out and baked into pies, its shell ready to be carved into jack-o-lanterns. Tell me, how New World is that?

E-mail the author at pride.place@gmail.com