Quebec City in Winter: The Coolest Place in North America

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

There are colder places in the world to be sure but Quebec City in winter is cold enough for most travelers especially ones like us from Southern California. Quebec can be cold even for the locals and January often the coldest month the city ever records. But the natives don't complain about cold. They unbelievably embrace it – and they rejoice.

The annual Winter Carnival, now in its 55th year, allows Quebecois to show their irrepressible joie de vivre and belief that life can be freezing fun. On the sidewalks they chatter happily to each other as they lean into biting winds that would make citizens in a Chicago winter take to their beds. In front of their shops locals carve ice sculptures of Bonhomme, the logo of the winter festivities – and he's always waving a cheerful hand. Quebecois even build a hotel of blocks of ice and, gulp, sleep in them – on blocks of ice. And encourage tourists to join them.

And tourists do. For the last seven years the Ice Hotel in Quebec has lured guests in for the extraordinary, er let’s say it, weird, experience of sleeping in a building made entirely of 500 tons of ice and 155,000 tons of snow. The builders and ice carvers start in mid-December and finish a month later. The 36 rooms then open for what has to be the shortest tourist season for any lodging. The hotel gets bulldozed in early April.

The furniture made of ice, of course, can create problems. The common one is where guests take off their rings at night and place them on the ice shelf. In the morning the warm rings are discovered deep in the shelves and housekeeping has to come with a chisel! Guests arrive in all forms: one came back to the front office and said, "We can't find the thermostat in our room. How do we adjust the heat?" Others jump in the hot tub, dry off in the sauna and wander back to their rooms wrapped only in a towel, then sleep naked in the sleeping bags provided. The tapered bags, worn tight around the face and neck, are neither for the claustrophobic or those who've never slept as if handcuffed. The guest book comments reflect the different attitudes: the Americans often writing stuff like, “We’re off now – to Orlando”; "We'll be back – in summer!" and the French, with perhaps more bravado than honesty, inscribing cryptically "Une expérience unique!"

It is unique. Over the last eight years more than 340,000 day visitors have come to wonder at the only ice hotel in North America -- and 17,300 guests have checked in for the night -- and most have made it though till dawn. They've admired the beautiful ice sculptures, hung around the Absolut Bar, and more briefly checked out the ice cinema and ice chapel. And they've even got married in the hotel without any groom getting cold feet; 16 marriages were being planned when we were there.

For a different kind of cold feet the immediate neighborhood offers activities like dogsledding, snowmobiling, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. Then, of course, 45 minutes east lies the walled city, Vieux-Quebec -- like Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Indeed Travel+Leisure readers have declared Quebec the 4th best destination in North America.

Visitors who come warmly dressed for the annual Winter Carnival at the end of January find a city with its hair down: from indoor concerts to a dogsled and sleigh race and soapbox derby. Visitors can also engage in snow carving, snow rafting, ice fishing and trampoline bouncing.

But at all times a walk around the old city reveals unforgettable streets and buildings going back to the seventeenth century. The Chateau Frontenac Hotel, the city's symbol, towers like a signpost above the old town as if showing the way to Place Royale, the first permanent French settlement in North America. The trompe l'oeil mural there leads to the shops of the Rue du Petit-Champlain in one direction and, in the other, the world-class Museum of Civilization.

Nearby sits little Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, built in 1688, the oldest stone church in North America and above it, in the new city, the magnificent Notre-Dame de Quebec Basilica-Cathedral whose glory shows the influence of the church in this, our most foreign neighbor.