Eighteen hotels,
written down
rather than sold.

The building is the reason this entry opens the wire. Expo 67 left Montréal a set of national pavilions on artificial islands in the river, and the French pavilion — a stacked, faceted aluminium structure — was among the most ambitious. It was never a hotel. Its conversion kept the exterior silhouette and reworked the interior into a many-levelled volume connected by escalators and voids, which is an unusual way for a building of this use to be organised.

Around it, Île Notre-Dame is parkland, water and the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, with the city skyline visible across the channel. The setting is genuinely strange: an island of Sixties optimism, largely empty at night, a bridge ride from downtown Montréal.

Inside, the hotel and the restaurants carry the guest side of the operation, with several dining rooms at different levels and a hall used for touring performers through the year. The hotel itself is a separate low block beside the pavilions rather than rooms stacked within them, which is why the original silhouette survived the conversion intact. This archive files the building, the rooms and the food, and does not describe or assess the gaming areas. Québec's minimum age is eighteen, and the complex is for adults.

Richmond sits on the delta flats between Vancouver and the sea, and this resort takes the river frontage seriously. A marina is built into the site, so arrival by water is genuine rather than decorative, and the long elevation faces the channel with the North Shore mountains visible beyond it on clear days.

The building is broad and low-shouldered by resort standards, with the hotel block set above a podium that carries the public rooms. A performance hall occupies part of that podium and takes touring musicians through the year. Restaurants run from casual to formal, and the spa and pool sit on the upper levels.

The complication, and the reason it reads differently from the other Canadian entries on this wire, is its neighbour: Vancouver International Airport is immediately across the water. That makes the resort unusually easy to reach — the SkyTrain runs past, and transfers are minutes rather than an hour — and unmistakably urban. This is not a quiet riverside. As elsewhere on this wire, the archive files architecture, rooms and restaurants. British Columbia's minimum age is nineteen, and the complex is for adults.