| Ice Hotel | |
|---|---|
| Location | Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier, Quebec, Canada |
| Opening date | January 1, 2001[1] |
| Rooms | 85 |
| Floors | 1 |
| Parking | Yes |
| Website | icehotel-canada.com |
The Ice Hotel (French: Hôtel de Glace) near Quebec City, Quebec, Canada is the first ice hotel in North America.[2]
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The Ice Hotel opened on New Year's Day in 2001.[1] For its first year it was located in Montmorency Falls Park, which is on the outskirts of Quebec City,[1] with plans right from the beginning to move to the nearby Duchesnay resort for its next year, where it has been built ever since.[1]
The hotel is located 5 km north of Quebec City, on the first slopes of the Laurentian mountains, in the Charlesbourg borough. It is the first ice hotel in North America and is built each December for an opening date in early January. The hotel has a four-month lifespan each year before being brought down in April.[3] It had 22 beds when it first opened in 2000. In its last iteration it had 85 beds, all made of ice but lined with deer furs and covered with mattresses and Arctic sleeping bags. Only the bathrooms are heated and located in a separate insulated structure.
It takes about a month and a half to build with 60 workers. The Hotel makes its own snow using a special mixture to adjust the humidity.[3] It is built with metal frames, it is allowed to harden for a few days, and then the cranes are removed.[3] The hotel is made of 15,000 tons of snow and 500,000 tons of ice and the walls are up to four feet thick.[3]
The hotel is usually made (the architecture and size may vary from season to season) in arches over rooms with 16 foot (5 m) and larger and higher spaces for one art galleries a club dubbed the N'Ice Club, an "Ice Café" and a 60-feet slide. The walls are over 4 feet (1.2 m) thick on average. All furniture is made of ice. In addition to using ice glasses as in the Kiruna ice hotel, the bar (and room service) also serves cold cuts on ice plates.
Amenities include a nightclub, movie theater, indoor heated washrooms and outdoor hot tubs.[4]
The hotel has been described as a "tourist hotspot"[3] and is backed by Quebec's tourism department.[5] For its first year, it costs $350,000 to build, including $125,000 from the Quebec government.[6]
Tours are available in French or English, seven days a week, and the hotel is otherwise open to the public.[5] After the fourth season, the official statistics reported 220,000 visitors and 10,500 overnight guests.[4] In its fifth season, it hosted around 70,000 tourists.[3]
There is a chapel where weddings are celebrated. The Ice Hotel has been described as one of the "10 dream wedding locations."[7]
Eighteen weddings were conducted for the 2003 season, and the Ice Hotel had its first same-sex wedding in February 2005, after same-sex marriages became legal in Quebec in April of the previous year.[4]