Château Montebello

Fairmont Le Château Montebello
The Château in winter
General information
Location	Montebello, Quebec, Canada
Address	500 Notre-Dame, Montebello, QC JOV 1LO, Canada
Opening	1 July 1930
Owner	Evergrande Real Estate Group
Management	Fairmont Hotels and Resorts
Other information
Number of rooms	211
Website
www.fairmont.com/montebello

The Fairmont Le Château Montebello or simply Château Montebello is a hotel and resort complex in Montebello, Quebec, Canada. The setting for the retreat is 26,305 hectares (65,000 acres) of forested wildlife sanctuary and 70 lakes on the shore of the Ottawa River, between Ottawa and Montreal. It is located on the border with Ontario.

In the late 1920s, Harold M. Saddlemire, a Swiss-American entrepreneur, acquired a site along the Ottawa River, on land that formerly formed part of the seigneurial system of New France.

The hotel is on one of the last surviving land grants made by 17th-century French kings to early settlers of New France.

François de Laval, the first Bishop of Quebec, purchased the property in 1674 from the French East India Company. The Quebec Seminary inherited it from Laval. In 1801, the land was sold to the family of Joseph Papineau. His son, Louis-Joseph Papineau, built a turreted stone mansion, the Manoir Papineau, in typically French style. The grand house, which was designated a National Historic Site of Canada, functions as a museum which is open in the summer. It is the only structure on the property which doesn't conform to the log cabin motif of the resort.

Saddlemire envisioned a private wilderness retreat for business and political leaders. He initially called this project "Lucerne-in-Quebec;" subsequently came to be known as the Seigniory Club. Despite the 1929 Wall Street Crash of 1929, work on the planned wilderness retreat began, as planned, in early 1930.

The economic uncertainty did not delay the project, unlike many others, perhaps because the presidents of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the National Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada respectively, not to mention the Premier of Quebec, were all club directors. A special spur from the nearby CPR line had to be built to allow for the transport of red cedar logs and other supplies to the site. The Scandinavian log construction project was supervised by Finnish master-builder, Victor Nymark and construction manager Harold Landry Furst. Construction and woodworking teams worked in overlapping shifts around the clock using electric lighting at night. The church did not approve of working on the Sabbath; but by coincidence, the local curé was dispatched on an all-expenses paid trip to Rome for two months while the work proceeded apace.