How romantic is Montréal? Well, a set of lush lips adorns Tourisme Montréal’s logo, standing in for the “o” in the city’s name!

The Wick has done it again. It has topped Travel + Leisure magazine’s ‘best hotels in Canada’ list for the second year in a row.

While Ontario and British Columbia have their Icewines – sweet, luscious nectars squeezed from frozen grapes – Québec has turned the province’s harsh climate from a curse into a blessing and created ice cider, a tart alcoholic concoction coaxed from frozen apples.

A lazy beach stint is fun, but sometimes you want more. Here are a couple of unique educational vacations when you want to move from looking to learning:

1.    Stay at a Subarctic Research Station

Québec in winter can be a fairy tale kind of place, especially when you’re cozy under a blanket on a horse-drawn-sleigh-bells-tinkling ride through the forest. Or catching snowflakes on your cheeks as you skate across a frozen lake lit up at night, finishing with a steaming mug of hot chocolate.

From its reputation as home to Canada’s best jazz festival to its sophisticated savoir-faire, Montréal has always had a sort of “Birth of the Cool” insouciance.

Less than 30 minutes from downtown Québec City, Parc national de la Jacques-Cartier is a dramatic landscape of mountains and steep-sided glacial valleys. The most spectacular is 550 metres (1,800 feet) deep with the Jacques-Cartier River winding along its base through forests of birch and sugar maples.

 Trust an adventurous Quebecker to come up with yet another way to play with adrenalin in mid-winter. Just 30 minutes from Québec City, at the foot of Mont-Sainte-Anne, caving enthusiast Marc Tremblay created the brand new sport of ice-canyoning – abseiling down the vertical face of a frozen waterfall.

Montréal has always been known for its food, but it’s been a low-key love affair: classic French cuisine with a glass of wine on a sunny sidewalk terrace or hearty Québecois dishes on a wintry night. But lately the city is becoming a magnet for high profile celebrity chefs.

It’s spooky out there this month, even in downtown Montréal, which is turning up the fright factor for a scary urban Halloween. At the Old Port, Shed 16 is a huge indoor labyrinth with a maze of dark alleys, surprising obstacles and riddles.