Château Frontenac

Few buildings own a skyline the way the Château Frontenac owns Quebec City. It sits at the very lip of the promontory where the Upper Town ends and the cliff drops to the Saint Lawrence, so from the river, from the ferry to Lévis or from the boardwalk below, the city seems to gather itself up into a single mass of copper roofs, turrets and dormers. It is a hotel, not a fortress, but it was built to look like one: a castle conjured in the 1890s for railway passengers, which over a century has become the emblem of the city and is often called the most photographed hotel in the world.

The Canadian Pacific Railway commissioned it, and the New York architect Bruce Price drew the first wings, which opened in December 1893. The idea was to give travellers arriving in the old capital of New France a building that matched its romance, and Price borrowed freely from the châteaux of the Loire: steep pitched roofs, round and polygonal towers, ornate gables, machicolations and wrought-iron details over a base of grey stone and walls of brick. The hotel grew in stages — an addition in 1908–09, then the great central tower of 1920–24 by the brothers Edward and William Sutherland Maxwell, which made it the tallest building in the city for a few years — and a further wing in the 1990s. Parks Canada, which listed it as a national historic site in 1981, regards it as the prototype of the château-style railway hotels that later spread across the country, and the purest example of the type.

The site itself carries older history. The Château Saint-Louis, residence of the French governors, stood on this cape from the 17th century, and the hotel is named after Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, twice governor of New France. In 1943 and 1944 the building hosted the two Quebec Conferences, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Mackenzie King met to plan the Allied war effort, and Alfred Hitchcock used it as a location for his 1953 film I Confess.

What to look at: walk the length of the Terrasse Dufferin, the broad wooden promenade that wraps around the hotel above the river, and watch how the roofline changes as you go; step into the courtyard through the porte-cochère with its cupola; then go down to the Lower Town, or cross the river to Lévis, for the classic view of the tower rising over the old streets. In winter, with snow on the roofs and lights in the windows, the building looks most like the fairy-tale castle it was designed to imitate.

Getting there

The hotel stands in the heart of Old Quebec, about 0.7 km from the centre of Quebec City, on rue des Carrières beside Place d'Armes and the Terrasse Dufferin. The nearest airport is Quebec City Jean Lesage International Airport (YQB), about 14.5 km away. Old Quebec is compact and best explored on foot; the public areas around the building — the terrace, the square and the courtyard — are open to everyone.