Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu is a castle in all but name — a grand, copper-roofed chateau on a bluff over the St. Lawrence in Charlevoix, with the refined Casino de Charlevoix linked by a covered walkway.
The Casino de Charlevoix is elegant rather than enormous — a tasteful Loto-Quebec room of table games, electronic gaming and slots, linked to the chateau by a covered passage so the weather never touches you. It is calm, refined and beautifully kept, sized to complement the hotel rather than compete with it.
That restraint is the point: this is a floor for an unhurried evening between dinner and the terrace, not a marathon in a windowless hall. For a certain kind of trip, it is exactly right.
The chateau holds around 400 rooms and suites in classic Fairmont style, a great many angled over the river and the Charlevoix hills, with the grandeur of a genuine heritage grand hotel behind them.
This is a resort first and a casino-hotel second, and it shows in the service, the public rooms and the sense of occasion — you come for the building as much as the gaming.
Several restaurants, cliff-top pools, a full spa and a celebrated 27-hole golf course fill the grounds, with skiing, whale-watching and the Charlevoix food trail on the doorstep.
Few casino-hotels anywhere pair gaming with this much to do, and none in Canada do it in a setting like this.
The resort sits in La Malbaie, about two and a half hours downriver from Quebec City along one of the country's most scenic drives.
It is a splurge, plainly — but as a romantic or special-occasion escape with a casino attached, it is in a class of its own and earns every dollar.