The Cultures Traveler

Quebec City’s annual Winter Carnival is the biggest and best on earth

When you're a summer people
In a cold climate, party on

It may have been the Quebec French who invented the expression, “If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.” Only in their case, since Quebec Province isn’t all that friendly to citrus fruits, Quebeckers probably would have decided to make a good apple cider instead.

That’s because Quebec has very harsh winters, sometimes lasting half the year. Temperatures plummet, the St. Lawrence River ices up and becomes treacherous, and outdoor life becomes downright perilous.

To the ebullient Quebeckers, whose ancestors emigrated from France’s sunny clime, there can only be one response to winter’s grim attempts to keep them indoors and morose: throw a party.

A big party. So big it ranks as the third largest Lenten carnival on earth. And outdoors, too, right in winter’s chilly heart. Pack the party with cold-defying events like ice baths, dog sled races, demonstration Inuit igloos people can rent for a night, ice palaces and sculptures, snowmobile races and Viennese-style dance balls.
Fantastic buildings sculpted from ice blocks.

It’s called the Quebec Winter Carnival and there’s nothing else quite like it on earth. Yes, Scandinavian countries build ice palaces and have winter fests, too, as well as China and Japan. But for pure panache, joie de vive and je ne sais quoi, this is the ice party to beat.

Travelers know that, too. Almost 1 million out-of-towners visit Quebec City each year during the carnival’s 17-day run. Despite the often intense cold of a Quebec winters, visitors are emboldened by the Quebeckers own almost nonchalant attitude toward the chill. One of the best demonstrations of it is The Snow Bath, an annual event when 100 or so crazed locals strip down to their thongs, Speedos and modified muumuus, then romp in the snow.


At the other end of the festivities is the annual Bonhomme’s Ball, an all-out, dress-to-the-nines, Viennese-style ball hosted by Bonhomme Carnaval, the winter carnival’s snowman symbol and master of ceremonies. The ball is just one of many dances and soirees that take place throughout the city during the carnival.

Of course there is a giant parade that precedes the big ball. Brilliantly lit floats wend their way at night past tens of thousands of spectators. For a few hours, the cold dark of winter is defeated and sent far to the back of people’s minds.

The background for the winter carnival is the walled city of Quebec, North America’s first declared World Heritage City (1985). Founded in 1608, Quebec City was one of the medieval world’s last urban projects. With its long, fortified wall along the St. Lawrence River, overlooking the Plains of Abraham, Quebec City was deliberately a citadel from the start, prepared to withstand siege and assault.

Of course history and technology soon marginalized Quebec City’s fortifications. Modern artillery made thick walls obsolete, and the decisive battle for Quebec City’s future took place between armies clashing on the Plains of Abraham below the city in 1759. It was there that British General James Wolfe decisively defeated the French General, the Marquis de Montcalm, in a battle that gave the British mastery of Canada.
A look down Rue Saint Louis, a typical street in old Quebec City

Through subsequent decades, as Quebec reeled from that defeat and watched Canada arise in the world’s consciousness as a British nation, the province retreated into a deep insularity. One good effect of that isolation was an unwillingness to “modernize” by dismantling the past. Quebec City’s intimate domestic architecture, narrow streets and fortified walls escaped so-called improvements and redevelopment.

When Quebec began emerging from its cocoon in the 1950s, it could proudly survey a magnificent architectural legacy. Europeans and North Americans soon discovered the joys of Quebec’s authentic charms, where stone houses and narrow streets were the real thing, not some clever set in a Florida amusement par

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