Quebec City Ice Hotel © Lucy Izon

Quebec City – The Ice Hotel is unquestionably one of the world’s coolest hotels. It has four-foot thick walls that insulate like a thermos, keeping the temperature inside between 23 and 28° Fahrenheit (-2°and –5° Celsius). Each year’s design is different, with a complete hotel constructed using about 15,000 tons of snow and 500 tons of ice. Versions have featured 44 theme rooms and suites, a chapel, a cinema, an outdoor hot tub, a sparkling chandelier and bar – all carved from ice. Public tours are available (have a drink in a glass carved of ice) or book in advance for an overnight stay (ice beds have furs and thermal sleeping bags). It’s been the site of weddings, concerts and fashion shows, and is open annually early January to early April.

Lucy Izon in bedroom @ Ice Hotel

To date more than one-half- million have visited, 25,000 have spent the night, and more than 130 couples have been married at the hotel’s Ice Chapel.

I shot the video below several years ago when the Ice Hotel was aboriginal location, 25 minutes from Quebec City. It is now much closer to the city. Having switched to a new location for the winter of 2011, the hotel is now built each year in a park just a 10-minute drive from downtown Quebec City. The new location at 9530, rue de la Faune, is near the old site of the Quebec Zoo. At the end of each season the hotel is not just left to just melt, because of the length of time that that would take. Machinery is used to help dismantle it.