Drummondville

Drummondville sits on the Saint-François River in Centre-du-Québec, a region that gets skipped by most itineraries running the Montréal–Québec City corridor because it’s neither, and that’s exactly the reason I wanted to see it. The town was founded as a garrison after the War of 1812, named for a British lieutenant governor, and grew into a manufacturing centre — textiles mostly — that has since diversified into a genuinely varied local economy. None of that is why people come, though.

The reason is the Village Québécois d’Antan, a living-history site on the edge of town that reconstructs a full 19th-century Québécois village — around seventy buildings moved or rebuilt from across the province, arranged along dirt streets with period gardens and real livestock. I went in expecting a mild diorama and got something considerably more immersive: a blacksmith actually forging iron, a baker actually pulling bread from a wood-fired oven, interpreters in character who answered questions about crop rotation and river transport with real specificity, not rehearsed patter. Lia spent a long time at the general store, which sells actual period-recipe candy, and left with a paper bag of horehound drops that tasted, she reported, exactly as unpleasant as she’d hoped.

Beyond the village, Drummondville has a pleasant riverside park system along the Saint-François, with a network of walking bridges and a genuine small-city downtown that doesn’t perform for visitors because it isn’t built to. We ate at a diner that’s clearly served the same regulars for decades, ordered a club sandwich the size of a brick, and watched a Tuesday afternoon in a town that exists entirely for the people who live in it — which, after a few days of tourist-heavy Québec City, was its own kind of relief.

Drummondville also hosts one of the province’s larger Christmas lights displays each winter, Le Village de Noël, which apparently draws visitors from well outside the region. I haven’t caught it myself but the photos I’ve seen — thousands of lights strung across the historic village — make a strong case for a return visit in December.

When to go: May through October for the Village Québécois d’Antan, which closes for winter. Early December for the Christmas lights festival, if you’re passing through the region during the holidays. Summer for the riverside parks and a genuinely pleasant walk along the Saint-François.