Apartment for rent in Cité-Universitaire: neighbourhood guide

The area was first part of the Sillery seigneury, granted in 1651 to the Huron-Wendat under the guardianship of the Jesuits. Settlement began in the 1660s and, in 1667, a bark chapel was built at the corner of today’s chemin des Quatre-Bourgeois and Autoroute Robert-Bourassa. In 1673, the Huron-Wendat left the area for Lorette. The côte Saint-Michel was cleared along chemin Sainte-Foy, around the Notre-Dame-de-Foy mission, the cradle of the village of Sainte-Foy.

Until the 20th century, the area remained mostly farmland. Institutions then settled on its large tracts of land: the Notre-Dame-de-Belmont cemetery, the tuberculosis hospital, later Hôpital Laval, which opened in 1918 with 120 beds, the Institut Saint-Jean-Bosco in 1923 and the Pavillon Montcalm in 1925. In 1931, the Maison Gomin became the Québec City region’s first prison for women only.

Short of space in Old Québec, Université Laval bought the Brophy sisters’ property in 1942, then more land in 1944. Architect and planner Édouard Fiset drew up the master plan for the university city, and work began in 1949, the year construction of boulevard Laurier began. In the 1950s and 1960s, streets of bungalows and apartment buildings appeared around the campus.

Place Laurier opened to the southwest in the early 1960s and the Pyramide de Sainte-Foy, to the north, in 1975, the year Autoroute Robert-Bourassa came into service. The François-Xavier-Garneau, Sainte-Foy and Champlain St. Lawrence CEGEPs settled here around 1970. After Sainte-Foy merged with Québec City in 2002, the TELUS-Université Laval Stadium was built in 2010 and the PEPS sports complex was expanded in 2013.