Val-d'Or carries Abitibi in its regional self-description and Culture VD on its municipal culture menus. That pairing matters: the city does not separate arts listings from the mining geography that built the place. Ville de Val-d'Or keeps Culture VD beside libraries and spectacles, so a weeknight show and a heritage outing can live in the same civic sentence. Tourisme Val-d'Or pushes the visitor version of that story when the parking lots fill with out-of-town plates and highway dust.
Cité de l'Or is the named attraction that makes the underground concrete. Ancienne-Mine-Lamaque supplies the former mine site, and Village minier de Bourlamaque adds the interpreted mining village with guided or self-guided walks. Residents treat the trio as one outing cluster: go down the Lamaque story, walk Bourlamaque's streets, and let Cité de l'Or hold the ticket desk. Gold is not a metaphor here; it is the address on the heritage map and the reason school groups still book mornings underground.
Modern Val-d'Or still sounds like an Abitibi service centre that kept its mine museums open after the headframes quieted. Culture VD programming keeps evenings local when the highway feels long and the next town feels farther than the map admits. OpenStats has no composite City Score rank for Val-d'Or in the current datapack, which leaves the hometown portrait uncluttered. That is enough identity for a city that never needed a composite rank to know what it sells: Culture VD calendars, Cité de l'Or tickets, Lamaque underground, and Bourlamaque streets under an Abitibi sky.