Cathedral Basilica of Notre-Dame de Québec

Quebec City, Upper Town. The oldest church in Canada explains how central the Church was to New France's government and identity. Building began in 1647, on a site where Champlain had raised a chapel in 1633, and the crypt holds the bishops of Quebec, including François de Laval, the first, along with four governors of New France. The building is also a record of what the city survived. It burned during the siege of 1759 and again in 1922, and was rebuilt each time, so the cathedral you see is the product of persistence as much as of the seventeenth century. Its Holy Door, one of very few outside Europe, gives Catholic visitors another reason to come.