Québec began in 1608 when Samuel de Champlain established a French trading post below Cap Diamant, on territory long used by Indigenous peoples. The settlement became the administrative and religious center of New France, commanding a narrowing of the St. Lawrence River. Upper Town gathered the governor's residence, churches, convents, and defenses; Lower Town developed around the port and Place Royale. British forces captured Québec in 1759 after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and France ceded most of its North American empire in 1763.

British rule altered institutions without erasing the city's French-speaking Catholic character. Fortifications were strengthened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, culminating in the Citadelle and associated works. Merchants, soldiers, artisans, religious communities, and legislators occupied a dense city of stone houses, narrow streets, gates, and public buildings. Québec served as capital at several moments before Canadian Confederation. By the later nineteenth century, however, military technology had made the walls obsolete, and demolition threatened portions of the enclosure as residents sought easier circulation and urban expansion.

Governor General Lord Dufferin encouraged preservation of the walls and promoted a romantic historical identity for Québec. Against this backdrop, the Canadian Pacific Railway commissioned a grand hotel to attract affluent rail travelers. Architect Bruce Price designed the first Château Frontenac section, which opened in 1893 on the former site of the colonial Château Haldimand. Named for New France's governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac, the hotel used steep roofs, towers, dormers, and masonry to evoke a French château rather than reproduce any specific medieval building.

The hotel expanded repeatedly. Edward and William Maxwell designed the central tower and major additions completed in the 1920s, giving the structure its familiar skyline. It hosted political meetings and prominent guests, including the 1943 and 1944 Québec Conferences at which Allied leaders discussed Second World War strategy. Renovations have renewed rooms, services, roofs, and interiors while preserving principal exterior character. The building is therefore an operating railway-era hotel enlarged and modernized over time, not a surviving château from the French colonial period and not a reconstruction of Frontenac's residence.

The Historic District of Old Québec became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985 and remains protected through federal, provincial, and municipal measures. Substantial historic fabric survives in the fortifications, street plan, religious institutions, civic buildings, houses, and commercial structures, though fires, rebuilding, restoration, and adaptive reuse shaped every quarter. Château Frontenac continues as a privately operated Fairmont hotel and National Historic Site; guests and visitors may enter public areas, while rooms and tours follow hotel arrangements. Streets and ramparts provide broader public access to a living district rather than a closed museum compound.