Bells across Canada ring for Quebec City's 400th anniversary

CANADIANS celebrated Thursday the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City, the beginnings of Canada and four centuries of French culture and language in North America.
Bells rang out across Canada at 11:00 a.m. Quebec time (1500 GMT) to mark the exact time that French explorer Samuel de Champlain is thought to have landed on these shores 400 years ago. With live music, a military parade and a performance by the Cirque de Soleil troupe, Canadians commemorated the day in 1608, marking Canada’s beginnings when Champlain crossed the Atlantic Ocean and headed up the Saint Lawrence River to establish the city with 30 other men.
“Four hundred years ago an explorer came this way, and today, a nation salutes him,” Quebec premier Jean Charest said at official ceremonies in the shadow of a statue of Champlain overlooking the river.
Rooted in the early days of the fur trade, and once the cradle of French civilization in North America that spanned from Acadia in easternmost Canada to Louisiana in the southern United States, Quebec City is now a bustling Canadian metropolis with a population of 700,000. Its old quarter, perched atop a cliff that overlooks the point where the Saint Lawrence widens on its way to the open sea, remains the only fortified city north of Mexico and a UNESCO world heritage site. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, flanked by his French counterpart Francois Fillon and two former French prime ministers, heralded Quebec City as “the most beautiful city in Canada.”
“The seeds sewn here 400 years ago have flowered into a magnificent city, a confident and proud Quebec nation and a Canada that is strong and free,” Harper said.
Party-goers here were to be served a gigantic cake, and treated to an evening open air concert with American rock band Van Halen on the Plains of Abraham, where French colonists lost to British troopers in 1759 in a key battle of the Seven Years’ War.����������������� - Inquirer