Fairmont's grand railway hotels of Canada
Fairmont Banff Springs hotel rising above the forest in the Rocky Mountains. Photo: DXR, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Château Frontenac, Banff Springs, Lake Louise, the Royal York, the Empress: Fairmont's best-known Canadian hotels were built by a railway that needed a reason for people to travel.
Long before anyone collected hotel points, the Canadian Pacific Railway had a problem. It had built a line across a vast and thinly populated country, and it needed passengers. The answer was to give people somewhere spectacular to go. The railway built grand hotels in the mountains and in its terminal cities, and many of them are now Fairmont hotels.
Banff Springs and Lake Louise
The Banff Springs Hotel opened in 1888 near the hot springs that had just become part of Canada's first national park. Rebuilt in stone in the early twentieth century, it looks like a Scottish baronial castle dropped into the Rockies. At Lake Louise, a simple wooden chalet from the 1890s grew into the Château Lake Louise, facing a turquoise lake and the Victoria Glacier.
Château Frontenac
In Quebec City, the Château Frontenac opened in 1893 on the cliff above the St. Lawrence River. With its copper roofs and turrets, it became one of the most photographed hotels in the world, and it hosted the Quebec Conferences of 1943 and 1944, when Allied leaders met there during the Second World War.
The city hotels
- The Empress, Victoria (1908): an ivy-covered landmark on the Inner Harbour, famous for afternoon tea.
- The Royal York, Toronto (1929): once described as the tallest building in the British Commonwealth, opposite Union Station.
- The Queen Elizabeth, Montreal (1958): a modern railway hotel built above Central Station.
How the Fairmont name arrived
Canadian Pacific Hotels bought the small Fairmont group, named after the Fairmont San Francisco, at the end of the 1990s and soon adopted the Fairmont name for the whole company. That is why a brand born in California is now most closely associated with Canadian castles.
Planning a railway-hotel trip
The classic route is still by rail: VIA Rail and private tourist trains cross the Rockies, and the hotels sit close to the old stations. In summer, book early, because the mountain hotels fill quickly. In Montreal, the Queen Elizabeth makes a good base for a city weekend that can include a night at the Casino de Montréal, which occupies the former French pavilion of Expo 67 on Île Notre-Dame, a short metro ride away.
