Every winter a hotel made of snow and ice rises just outside Quebec City, and every spring it melts away. The Hôtel de Glace opened on New Year’s Day 2001 as the first ice hotel in North America, and it has been rebuilt from scratch each season since, with new sculptures, new room themes and a new layout. Reddit user captainkrinking photographed one of its Charlesbourg editions, shared in early 2014, from the arched entrance to the themed suites and the hot tubs outside.
How the Hôtel de Glace is built each winter
The idea came from Sweden. Quebec entrepreneur Jacques Desbois visited the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi in 1996, studied how it was made and spent about four years adapting the concept to Quebec’s climate. The result is a building that exists for roughly four months a year.
Construction starts once temperatures stay below freezing for about a week, usually in late November or December. Around 50 workers, including a team of sculptors, need about six weeks to finish it. The structure is shaped over metal frames, which are removed once the snow has hardened for a few days. The hotel makes its own snow, with a mix adjusted for humidity so it packs well.
- Materials: about 30,000 tons of snow and 500 tons of ice, including some 3,000 ice blocks
- Walls: on average more than 1.2 metres (4 feet) thick
- Height: about 6 metres at its tallest
- Floor area: roughly 53,000 square feet (about 4,900 m²)
Themed ice rooms and suites
The double beds are blocks of ice set on solid wooden bases. Only the bathrooms are heated, and they sit in a separate insulated building. Because the hotel is rebuilt every year, the themed suites change with each edition. In the edition shown here the sculptors carved a Mayan room, a Moai room inspired by the stone heads of Easter Island, an Osiris room drawn from ancient Egypt, a Pirate room and a Travel room. Standard rooms are simpler, with an arched doorway and a carved ice bed.
Ice bar, chapel and outdoor spa
The Ice Bar is the social heart of the hotel. Drinks and cocktails are served in glasses carved from ice, and every piece of furniture is ice too. The hotel also has an ice chapel where couples marry each winter, and outdoor hot tubs let overnight guests warm up before bed. Recent editions have added a restaurant menu developed with Fairmont Le Château Frontenac and cultural days with Tourisme Wendake that showcase Wendat culture.
Visiting the ice hotel near Quebec City
The hotel has moved several times. It stood at Montmorency Falls in 2001, at the Duchesnay resort in Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier from 2002 to 2010, and at Charlesbourg, about 5 km north of downtown Quebec City, from 2011 to 2016. That Charlesbourg site, the former Quebec City Zoo grounds, is where these photos were taken. Since 2017 it has had a permanent home at Village Vacances Valcartier in Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier.
The hotel opens in early January and stays open until the spring thaw, usually into March. Day visitors can take a guided tour in French or English, and overnight guests spend the evening at the bar and spa before heading to their ice rooms. Inside, the temperature holds between −4 and −5 °C whatever the weather outside, which is close to the 26 °F captainkrinking measured on his visit. Dress in warm layers, a hat and waterproof boots, and leave anything sensitive to cold in the heated area.
The hotel pairs well with Quebec City’s winter season: see Québec City at Christmas: Old Streets and the Wider Winter Season.
Related reading
- igloo accommodation in an Alpine setting
- ice used for a very different promotional build
- Ten Ice and Snow Designs: Hotels, Sculptures and Experimental Spaces
- An Edmonton Rainbow Ice Igloo Built by Family and Friends
- Thirty-Seven Ski Areas in Western Canada: Mountain Regions and Resort Choices
- Antarctic Fieldwork in the McMurdo Dry Valleys: Alex Mass’s Gallery
- Seven Mountain Pools and the Landscapes Around Them
The ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden is better, and it is the original "Ice hotel"
ReplyDeleteThis one is fake and shitty