Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu

The St. Lawrence is 20 kilometres wide at La Malbaie, Quebec, and the water is salt. On the cliff above the river at Pointe-au-Pic stands Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu, a grey château with copper roofs and a terrace that looks downstream towards the Gulf. In the nineteenth century the place was called Murray Bay, and Americans came up by steamer for the summer; the hotel was built to keep them there.

History

The Richelieu and Ontario Navigation Company, which ran the river steamers, opened the first Manoir Richelieu in 1899, a wooden hotel of 250 rooms. Its successor, Canada Steamship Lines, ran it as the anchor of a summer colony that included William Howard Taft, who kept a house at Murray Bay for decades before and after his presidency. In September 1928 the wooden hotel burned to the ground. Canada Steamship Lines decided to rebuild in concrete and stone for the following season, and the Montreal architect John Smith Archibald produced a château in the manner of the railway hotels. Construction ran through the winter under heated tarpaulins, and the new Manoir opened in June 1929, a few months before the crash.

Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby and several Canadian prime ministers stayed in the decades that followed. The province of Quebec opened the Casino de Charlevoix next door in 1994, and the hotel was extensively renovated and enlarged at the end of the 1990s, when it joined Fairmont.

Architecture and design

Archibald's building is châteauesque, the style the Canadian Pacific had made the country's own at the Château Frontenac in Quebec City: steep copper roofs, dormers, turrets and a long symmetrical front facing the river. The lobby and the public rooms keep their 1929 panelling, fireplaces and Norman-revival plasterwork, and the terrace along the river side is the hotel's main room in summer. The late-1990s works added a conference wing and the links to the casino without altering the river facade.

Rooms and suites

The Manoir has 405 rooms and suites, which makes it the largest hotel in Charlevoix by a wide margin. Rooms on the river side look over the St. Lawrence and the hills of the south shore; those at the back face the gardens and the golf course. Decoration is traditional, with dark furniture and heavy fabrics suited to the winters. The suites include several named apartments on the upper floors with sitting rooms and river views.

Dining

The hotel keeps three restaurants and a bar, with the main dining room on the river side and a more casual room for breakfast and lunch; the terrace is used for summer dinners. Charlevoix is one of the better-known food regions in Quebec, with its own cheeses, lamb and vegetables, and the kitchens draw on that supply.

Wellness

There is an indoor pool and a heated outdoor pool open through the winter, a spa with treatment rooms, and a fitness centre. The Club de golf du Manoir Richelieu has 27 holes laid out along the cliffs above the river, built on the original 1925 course by Herbert Strong. In winter the hotel offers snowshoeing and cross-country skiing on the grounds, and the Massif de Charlevoix ski area is about 45 minutes away.

Weddings and events

The conference wing and the historic salons give the Manoir the largest meeting capacity between Quebec City and the Saguenay, and it hosts corporate congresses through the year. Weddings use the river-facing terrace and gardens for ceremonies in summer and the historic ballroom for receptions; the hotel's size means it can house a whole wedding party. As a luxury hotel in La Malbaie it has no competitor of the same scale in the region.

Location

The hotel is in the Pointe-au-Pic sector of La Malbaie, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence about 150 km north-east of Quebec City, a drive of roughly two hours on Route 138. Québec City Jean Lesage International Airport is the nearest airport. The Train de Charlevoix, a seasonal tourist train from Quebec City, stops at La Malbaie near the hotel. Whale-watching boats leave from Tadoussac, about 70 km further downriver.